


Nothing Important Happened Today

by ishie



Category: Big Bang Theory, The X-Files
Genre: 2010, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Community: bigbangbigbang, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-15
Updated: 2010-09-15
Packaged: 2017-10-11 21:05:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/117108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life as a new FBI recruit is nothing like Penny expected, but it's better than sitting around waiting for Kurt to grow up. Until she gets pulled out of training a few weeks early, that is. On the plus side: no more pre-dawn obstacle course runs; but partnering with the Bureau's resident crackpot? This is so not what she signed up for. She's ready to toss her shiny new (provisional) badge in the Potomac, until Agent Cooper gives her a look at the first case they'll be investigating - something the Bureau hasn't seen in almost fifty years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing Important Happened Today

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2010 BigBangBigBang! This is BBT in an XF world with a twist, where absolutely nothing makes sense, including where the hell all these words came from. The title and three lines (you'll recognize them!) are from XF, and in the interest of full disclosure: about 1000 words are from _The I in FBI_ , although some have been changed to protect the unbeta'd.
> 
> HUGE THANKS to my beta Inkdot for talking me out of the trees when my first draft tried to kill me, and for her judicious enabling when the second draft reared up out of nowhere; to sounding boards extraordinaires The_Wanlorn and Sparklystuff; and to Renisanz for picking up a pinch-hit ♥
> 
> Thanks also to my co-mods, Weasleytook and Bekkis, and to everyone who participated in the first Big Bang Big Bang. We had a blast and we hope you did too!

After busting her ass through weeks of training—

That might have been an overstatement. Penny hadn't exactly given it her all so far, just enough effort to keep from washing out. The classes were challenging in ways she hadn't expected but they weren't difficult by any stretch. Most days her recruit class sat through lecture after lecture in creaky chairs, punctuated with carefully scheduled practical trials that never took anyone by surprise.

On a couple of occasions, the biggest challenge she faced was not getting caught sneaking back into her assigned quarters just minutes before PT started in the morning. There was little danger of being kicked out for conduct unbecoming, a welcome change from the last time she went through an intensive training course. But no matter how much of a cakewalk it was, Penny still desperately needed those few minutes of sleep after whatever off-the-books fraternization had kept her out all night. As it was, she was already clinging to whatever snatches of near-REM she could grab whenever the schedule permitted.

Although, getting up that early each and every morning _had_ kind of busted her ass. She was out of practice and getting softer the farther away from Omaha she got.

So, after weeks of rolling out of bed and into her running gear at hours when her friends were just coming in from the bars, it was a thrill to get called up out of yet another mind- and ass-numbing presentation and summoned to the Felt Federal Building for a temporary duty assignment.

But then Penny arrived for her first official day and found out that maybe being back at the academy (and within flirting distance of several hundred Marines on leave from their disaster relief missions) wasn't such a bad thing after all.

\---

The elevator clunked to a stop and the metal doors slid open with a whisper. She'd expected grinding and creaking, maybe for the car to shudder and shimmy with ominous groans. Or for a gaunt, gray-faced agent in a suit to be waiting for her just on the other side, spindly fingers reaching out to drag her into dark corners, never to be seen again.

Instead, Penny saw another of the building's endless drab corridors, filled with mismatched filing cabinets and shelving units shoved against the walls wherever possible, and closed pine doors as far as the eye could see. She consulted the scribbled directions she carried. The open doorway she needed was a few feet to her right, another drab wall visible just inside it.

Her low heels clacked on the linoleum as she stepped out of the carpeted elevator car. Apparently none of the tour groups made it down to this level. If they did, it was a good bet there would be miles more of the thin, hideous, dirty gray carpet underfoot that did little to disguise the evidence of decades of foot traffic.

It might be the seat of power for the Federal Bureau of Investigations, its offices filled with almost all of the upper ranks of agents and bureaucrats, but a whole lot of the place was either boring or gross. Or both.

A handful of steps down the side hallway brought Penny to another closed door. The only closed door, actually. Calling it a hallway was generous; more than anything else, it seemed like someone had just given up and forgotten to finish walling up a closet no one wanted to use. Dusty shelves full of cleaning supplies hugged the opposite wall and the light overhead flickered.

The urge to spin on her heel and flee was faint, but she would be lying if she didn't admit it was tempting all the same.

She knocked, a no-nonsense rap when what she wanted to do was pound with the heel of her fist and bellow for someone to tell her where the hidden cameras were. Penny had been looking forward to this assignment, despite the nerves that wracked her from the second she finished packing her bags at Quantico. They'd twisted around her stomach all the way to that morning when she'd stumbled around her long-neglected one bedroom apartment just outside the Beltway. And they certainly hadn't been helped as she prayed the MARC tracks wouldn't choose that morning of all mornings to finally collapse in a shrieking pile under all its accumulated failures. Nor when she made her way across the polished floor in the lobby, clutching her boring attaché case every step of the way.

There was no answer inside the office, so she knocked again. This time there was a muffled squeak and then a crash, like someone throwing a drawer closed, and then:

"Sorry, nobody down here but the FBI's most unwanted!"

Penny already knew the guy inside was a genius, certified and all, but she'd thought the infamous nickname that dogged every mention of him was about about his chosen field of investigation and not his personality.

 _Thought_. Maybe _hoped_ was a better word.

Other than that one muffled, less than gracious greeting, there was no other response from behind the closed door. Penny knocked again. Her knuckles grazed the edge of the battered nameplate hanging off the door at a weird angle, with what looked like black electrical tape. A corner of it, folded over and hardly even sticky, was just visible under one skewed corner. She picked at it with her pinky nail and wondered if she would be here long enough to have to do the same with her own nameplate. If she even got a nameplate.

She tried again. "Agent Cooper? I was told to report here after lunch."

Nothing. Not even another deflection. Penny rolled her eyes and hiked up the waistband of her skirt. Apparently new-job nerves made a better diet than the Nutrisystem crap she dropped half a paycheck on every time Kurt started calling her Big Bertha. And, anyway, at least nerves didn't taste as bad as the chocolate cake's weird aftertaste.

The door handle moved easily under her hand and she stopped short and gave it a suspicious look. Would he have booby-trapped the door to keep out prying eyes? He had to know who she was and why she was there.

Penny took a step back and looked around the hallway. The elevator around the corner was still rumbling its way back upstairs from the basement level where it had deposited her. Other than that, there was no noise except for the insistent buzz of fluorescent lights. The linoleum under her feet and the off-white walls gleamed in the sickly artificial light, looking just as clean and new as if they'd been installed the week before. She thought again that it looked like this floor didn't get much traffic. At least not this part. Maybe it was a different story elsewhere, but back here it was just her, some dusty shelves, and the crazy man behind door number one.

"Oh, what the hell," Penny muttered. She squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and twisted the handle. The office was as dark as a cave when she pushed open the door. A lamp was on in the far corner, and a brighter bluish glow spilled out of a doorway about halfway back along the wall.

"Agent Cooper?" she called, looking into the gloom. Against the wall that ran parallel to the hallway, there was a desk overflowing with maps and folders, and a boxy computer terminal shoved back out of the way. A dozen multi-colored post-its clung to its square black face. The outline of another desk was just visible in the shadows of the opposite wall.

And every available surface was covered in paper: hanging on the walls, stacked on top of the filing cabinets and all over the floor, stuck to the tiny window set high in the wall so that they blocked out whatever tiny amount of light was trying to struggle through.

"I was just assigned to you," Penny continued as if all of this was totally normal. As if none of it looked like something out of a serial killer's handbook. "I'm Agent—"

A man burst through the doorway in a wheeled desk chair. Backward, with his hands clamped on the padded arms, tie rippling weakly. In his wake, papers fluttered on their tacks and swirled off the nearest desk. Penny ground one heel into the floor and tensed her shoulders, shifting her weight in case she had to defend herself.

So this was "Moonpie" Cooper; Sheldon to his mother, presumably. Advanced degrees out the yin-yang, Criminal Analysis's golden boy burnout, scourge of absolutely no one despite his concerted efforts, nuisance to many, so on and so forth.

He was on the scrawny side, all long spindly legs and prominent wristbones, even more than in the ID photo in her orientation folder and the one glimpse she had of him when a fellow recruit pointed him out at Quantico.

She could so take him.

Still, though, his entrance was aggressive and Penny hadn't slacked at all on her defensive tactics training. Highest mark in more than five years, even. Hell, she'd flipped the instructor, a big tough ex-Terror captain, hard enough to break his nose. On more than one occasion.

"I know who you are," Cooper said. It seemed he overshot his mark a little, or else he didn't care what kind of damage it did to his image to awkwardly crab-walk the chair back into the circle of light from the next room. Or as close as he could get under his own power. With a scowl down at the chair pads that got in the way of the tiny plastic wheels, he stood and kicked the chair out of the way.

"I was under the impression that you were sent to spy on me."

Cooper towered over her, a glower fixed on his face. It was like being glared at by a twig. He might be a full head taller, but he only had about five pounds on her — ten, once she managed to put down the cheesecake fork — and he was definitely trying to loom.

Too bad for him, though, that Penny had just spent more than two hours trapped in a cheerless office with Director Gablehauser and the Creepy Clove Smoker. Two hours of Gablehauser giving her the third degree and trying his level best to intimidate her, while the other man smirked and tossed out insults and blew smoke in her face.

Whatever patience she had for putting up with stupid macho crap, tiny though it was, it had run out about half an hour into the interview. The next ninety minutes had been an exercise in trying not to grind her teeth into powder or put her fist through their smug faces.

God, she really needed coffee, too. Hot, black, strong enough to put hair on her chest; she wouldn't even turn down a mug of dandelion coffee, as long as she didn't have to go out in public afterward.

"Look," she snapped, smacking him in the chest with her transfer paperwork as she did, "I don't like this any more than you do, M— _Agent_ Cooper."

His nostrils flared. "I'm not crazy."

She stopped him with an outflung hand as she stalked over to the dusty desk in the corner and snapped on the light. "Yeah, I know. They showed me your test results."

Cooper settled a little, or at least stopped bristling like a feral cat. Penny couldn't resist poking him. Just to see how fast his back went up again, that was all. Testing boundaries and whatever other how-not-to-team-build crap she hadn't paid much attention to in the seminars.

"Your mom had you tested, though? Really?"

The glare he leveled at her was hot enough to melt a bowl of ice cream on a muggy August day in the District, at the very least. Penny smiled.

On second thought, she decided, this could be fun.

\---

Agent Cooper disappeared into the other room a few minutes later, muttering about interruptions. Penny dropped her attaché case in the bottom drawer of the desk she'd claimed and rolled her shoulders. All the accumulated tension of the past few days was riding hard on the muscles at the base of her neck. She unbuttoned her coat and slung it over the back of the chair, then dropped into its lumpy seat with a sigh of relief.

The transfer paperwork Cooper had reluctantly accepted was sitting on top of a precarious pile on his desk. Penny scooted her chair backward and snagged it, sending the top half-dozen manila folders cascading to the ground. Papers went flying, skidding across the tiled floor and the tan plastic chair pads scattered around the room.

"Shit."

"I told you not to touch anything. Put everything back where you found it!" he yelled from the next room.

"Christ, he's got ears like a bat," Penny muttered as she dropped to her knees to start scooping papers together.

"I'll take that as a compliment," he called. "Just put the papers on my desk. I can't imagine you'll be able to work out my organizational methods."

There was more, but it was mostly grumbling about being saddled with an incompetent, so Penny quit trying to listen and fanned out the open folders to see what went where.

His files were a mess: handwritten notes scrawled in the margins of typed observation logs and faxed incident reports, in a dozen different ink colors and mostly consisting of acronyms that made no sense. In some spots, it looked like the notes were in math instead of English, even. She flipped though some of the papers she held, looking for anything that might give her a clue as to where it should go. Not even the names, witnesses and suspects alike, were any help. Most were redacted, thick black lines dotted throughout the documents, and those that weren't were all "Unknown Suspect" this and "Anonymous Witness" that.

The photographs and clippings weren't any more help. None were tagged with dates or index numbers. Either she'd accidentally knocked over a stack he hadn't got around to processing yet, or his organizational methods were a complicated blend of "throw shit everywhere and hope you don't need it later."

In the end she shuffled everything into a loose pile and made a new stack on the floor to the right of his desk chair. Whatever the hell else Penny was supposed to do here, going crazy from trying to figure out how to file his crap wasn't part of it.

At least, she didn't think so.

She went back to the desk she'd claimed and opened the folder that held her own paperwork. It had taken trips to two different HR offices to get all the forms they said she needed, and one of them was bound to hold her login details for the ancient computer terminal. She hoped.

Near the back of the folder she found what looked like instructions for accessing her interoffice memo account. But before she could switch on the computer, Agent Cooper stormed back in from the other room.

He held a full slide tray, the old-fashioned kind she hadn't seen since elementary school. Under one arm was a bundle of what looked like rolled maps, squished in the middle between his elbow and ribs. He almost dropped the whole thing on the floor trying to pull a rolling cart away from the wall with one foot.

She thought about offering to help, but the truth was: she wasn't willing to go out of her way for this guy at all. She would do her time — however long that might be — and bolt at the first chance. The meeting with the suits upstairs had probably already burned a few bridges that should have stayed intact, or at least damaged the foundations a little.

But Penny wasn't too worried. She wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, maybe, but she wasn't an idiot. On top of that: she was a realist. The Bureau didn't invest in background checks and training for bottom-of-the-barrel recruits like her and then let them slip away for minor infractions. Not when they were facing recruitment shortfalls on the scale they had been for the past several decades. And certainly not when they and their fellow federal and state law enforcement agencies were getting raked across the coals every night by the news media and everyday citizens angry about paying money for nothing.

Her instructors acted like the Bureau was still a powerhouse, despite all evidence to the contrary outside of Quantico's fences. They lectured on inter-agency protocols like the FBI still had the biggest, swingingest dicks on the intelligence and law enforcement blocks. But the truth was that by the time the revelations were leaked early in Kennedy's first term, they'd lost what little power they managed to cling to when Hoover was ousted by Eisenhower. In the new world order, where people looked to the skies instead of over their shoulders, they lost most of their jurisdiction to the new United Nations Terrestrial Security Forces, or the Terror as they'd come to be known. As president after president pushed reforms through a suddenly friendly Congress, the dirtiest hands under Hoover found themselves cut adrift, leaving Director Felt to hold the reins as the agency's power and funding was whittled away year by year until there was almost nothing left.

Eighth grade civics class stuff, and hardly surprising, really. What use was there for a national police force when most major crime had dried up?

For all the Bureau's tarnished history, and the jokes at her expense, Penny saw a career with the FBI as the ticket out of her dead-end life. They didn't ask much of their recruits, just brains enough to follow directions and no criminal record. Thanks to a legal system that didn't see much point in paying for adult punishment for a sixteen-year-old girl, Penny met at least one of the requirements. It wasn't too hard to fake the former, not with all the practice she'd had.

In high school, she got caught one too many times helping her brother with his various enterprises. That last time, the judge had squinted over his glasses and ordered her to sign up for Junior ROTC. "Can't do much worse at this point," he'd muttered as the clerk slapped her file closed and waved her from the room.

Much to her surprise — much to _everyone's_ surprise, Penny had taken to it like a duck to water. The order, the discipline, even the curfews: all of it filled the void where her parents should have stepped in. But her mom had been too busy with her cures and gurus, and her dad too wrapped up in the disappointment of not having a son worthy of following in his footsteps.

Agent Cooper finally managed to swing the cart into the middle of the narrow office and dropped the slide tray on top. The maps he let drift to the floor, before he kicked them out of his way repeatedly as he moved around the cramped office. A few minutes rummaging in one of the tall filing cabinets unearthed a clunky old projector that fit the tray and smelled like burning tires once he'd plugged it in long enough for the bulb to warm up.

He crossed to the door in two giant strides and flipped off the light switch. It took a moment for Penny's eyes to adjust to the gloom, then the projector beamed white light against the wall, nearly blinding her in the process.

"What can you tell me about Oregon?" Cooper asked. He clicked buttons on the tethered remote. The slide tray clunked through three or four blanks before landing on a blurry image of trees and a river. A dark iron bridge straddled the banks; pale, water-stripped trunks clustered around the upstream side of the massive concrete pylons, water churning over and around barely submerged rocks.

"It's ... wet?"

"A stunning extrapolation," he said in a flat voice. "What about when you don't see millions of gallons of water rushing past?"

The next slide was of the same trees from a different angle. Or new trees, maybe. The river was gone though.

"I don't know. It's near Seattle, I guess. Kurt Cobain, Starbucks?"

She felt Cooper's stare but couldn't begin to guess what it meant.

"You know, grunge? Way too much flannel?"

"Seattle is in Washington, not Oregon," he said at last. "Do you have anything other than nonsense and faulty geography to add—"

"Why don't you just tell me?" she interrupted. They could sit here for years playing his stupid guessing game, especially since it seemed more likely every minute that he was the one from another planet.

He sighed, sounding exasperated, and advanced the slides at a rapid pace. Blurs of green and gray and brown rolled across the wall and disappeared again just as fast. "Pasadena, Oregon, is home to one satellite of the state university, an institution distinguished by absolutely no academic excellence at all. There are two recently closed saw mills, a tool and die industry that has been on the verge of collapse for almost as long as I've been alive, and the highest rate of unemployment in the Northwest."

Cooper clicked through a dozen or so shots of the town: empty storefronts and listless residents, litter strewn along curbs and in ditches. Just as Penny was about to interrupt his slide show to ask what the point was, he got to it.

One more click of the button and the images of general rural decay jumped to that of a body lying face-down on the ground. Naked limbs sprawled under a pale blue sheet. The loamy soil at the edge of the scene gave way to a large patch of dark green plants with vibrant yellow blooms. The colors were jarring against the body's mottled blue and gray flesh, almost obscenely healthy by contrast. There was no blood visible anywhere in the photo: no pools or spatter on, under or near the body; nothing showing on the sheet.

Penny pinched the fleshy bump at the base of her thumb, a trick learned long ago to keep her emotions from showing. This wasn't the first body she'd seen, wasn't even close. She wasn't a stranger to death — she hadn't been for a very long time — but something about this scene got under her skin and kept on digging.

"Alicia Azlynn, 28, found six nights ago by two local residents. No one knew she was missing until then."

He clicked to a close-up of the woman's lower right leg. A chunk of flesh was missing from her calf.

Penny stepped toward the wall. Most of her childhood had been spent tagging along behind her dad and uncles through the woods. By the time she was eight she was already a crack shot and familiar with most of the ways that animals and men broke down prey, both fresh and scavenged. The edges of this wound were smooth, no hesitation marks or the ragged tears she would expect to see from animals feeding on the corpse.

"Knife?" she asked. "It's definitely not teeth."

"Good catch," Cooper said. His voice was shaky, just a touch, like he his control was slipping. But only a little. Penny might have missed it if she hadn't been straining to hear every syllable over the whir of the projector's fan.

He clicked again, and a new image splashed across the wall. At first, she thought it was just a new angle, another picture taken a bit farther out to allow for more situational context — until she realized that the shoulders looked wider, and what little hair remained on the body was dark.

Alicia was a blonde.

She squinted. The clearing looked similar, but the yellow flowers were missing and the ferns were much shorter. Some were barely more than fiddleheads. The next slide showed someone kneeling in the low growth. Penny judged that the second body was probably male, given the size of the feet and the width of the shoulders.

"Two victims at the same dump site?"

"Yes, but not at the same time. This is David Underhill. Married, father of one, missing for three days before his body was found six weeks ago."

The maps rustled against her feet as she waded even closer to the wall. She turned to look back at Cooper, shielding her eyes from the beam. He was barely visible, just another shadow in the darkness. "You're not thinking serial, are you?"

It wasn't unheard of, though Penny knew most people would go through an entire career without encountering one.

"Interesting," he said after a pause, sounding surprised. "I expected much less of you. In any case, local law enforcement is, ah, headed down a different path. Take another look," he prompted.

Penny turned back to the grim image on the wall. Now that the shock had passed she was able to pick out new details: the way the plants were flattened beneath the body, the smooth-sided wounds on the back of the victim's thigh and the complete lack of blood at the scene, the careful way the hands were positioned with palms facing up toward the sky.

She waited for him to continue. He had obviously been all over the older case — his voice had lost the slight quaver and an easy, practiced drawl took its place. Maybe he wanted to hear her think out loud, the way some of the instructors did. But which detail should she lead with? Her gut told her that if she picked the wrong one, he would shut her down faster than she could blink. "They both look like a standard extra-tee dump," she started.

"Tell me," Cooper said, his voice dropping. Penny could barely hear him over the hum and whir of the projector. "Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?"

"Of course I do. Who doesn't?" She rolled her eyes, hoping he didn't have eyesight to match his freaky ears. "What the hell kind of question is that?"

The projector snapped off with a click, plunging them into darkness. A second later, she heard papers rustling, probably the maps shifting as Cooper stepped away from the center of the room. On a hunch, she squeezed her eyes closed. Just in time, too, because not even an instant later she heard the snick of the switch. The skin of her eyelids flared blood-red and she threw up a hand to block out the light.

When she finally blinked away the spots, Cooper had his arms crossed tight across his body.

"Visitations? Abductions?"

"Uh, _duh_. Don't you?"

His lips tightened for a moment. "Psychic abilities? Astral projection?"

"Sure. That's how my sister met her husband, in a vision at the psychic's office."

"I see," he said quietly. A tic started to jump below his left eye. "What are you really doing here, _Penny_?"

She propped her hands on her hips and met his glare. "Director Gablehauser assigned me as your partner, _Moonpie_. And since neither of us was able to get out of it, you're stuck with me. So suck it up."

"I'm still your superior officer," he sputtered.

She had a feeling that backpedaling wouldn't do her any favors. Not with this guy. "So suck it up, _sir_."

He kept glaring. His nostrils flared in time with the blink of his eyelids. She wondered if he practiced it in the mirror at night.

Penny held her ground. For all his huffing and puffing, he had only ratcheted the heat of that stare up to being able to melt an iced coffee on a warm spring day.

Their standoff only lasted a few seconds, until his desk phone rang and startled them both. Putting her hand over her racing heart for a second, Penny turned away to face the blank wall and get her temper under control. She couldn't keep doing this, or she really would be out on her ass, no matter what the smiling faces in HR had to say about it.

When Cooper hung up, he shuffled through some papers on his desk then handed her a sheaf of multi-colored papers.

"Here, take this to the motor pool and the travel office. We leave for Oregon first thing in the morning. Do you have your own car?"

It took a second longer for Penny's brain to catch up to the words he was firing at her. "Uh, no, I don't. Wait, yes!"

"Well, which is it? Unless you've got Schrödinger's car."

She ignored his weird snicker. Like she could afford a German car on what the Bureau paid trainees. "I have a car but it's not exactly—"

"Pick me up in the morning." He thrust a business card in her hand and turned away. "Our flight leaves from Baltimore at ten."

The address on the card was in Old Town Alexandria. Which was less than ten minutes from Mondale National Airport, while it was going to take them an hour and a half to get to Baltimore if there wasn't any traffic.

There was always traffic.

"Wouldn't it be faster if we flew out of Mondale? You can just hop on the Metro and meet me at the terminal. Then I don't have to worry about driving or parking—"

"I only fly out of Baltimore," he said to the computer screen he was switching on. "I don't trust anything named for one-term Presidents. I don't drive except in emergency situations, and I've been asked to only use the Metro under similar circumstances. Are you going to file the travel paperwork or will we have to walk all the way across the country?"

The urge to smack him on the back of the head, the way she would her brother or her nephews, was so strong that it took a good fifteen seconds for Penny to finally walk out.

Cooper was already typing before the door slammed behind her.

\---

Penny checked the department name on the door, then glanced down at the papers in her hand again. She'd been all over at least three floors so far and wasn't any closer to filing the requisition forms than she was when Cooper handed them to her.

"Can I help you find something?" someone droned in her ear.

She stepped to one side, away from the voice and the short, skinny man attached to it. The security badge attached to his belt identified him as _Wolowitz, Howard, Liaison Support_. That the badge was clipped to his belt, just a fraction of an inch away from the zipper of his too-tight striped trousers, identified him as the kind of self-styled ladies man she wanted to give a wide berth.

If he had to point it out, odds were pretty good he didn't know what to do with it.

Wolowitz smiled and spread his hands like he was trying to tell her he was harmless, but his eyes dipped down to the vee of her suit coat and the soft pink blouse showing through it.

"No, I'm good," she said with an cool but friendly smile, in case his gaze jumped back up to her face.

It didn't.

He leaned in closer, completely ignoring the way she moved away again, and went up on his toes to read the writing at the top of the page. "You're going to request travel in person?" he asked, sounding way more surprised than she thought the situation warranted. This time his eyes did meet hers. "Why don't you just book your tickets online? They've got it all set up on the intranet so they don't have to turn you down in person."

"Is that right?"

"Yeah, it's kind of hidden but it's pretty easy once you know your way around." He looked her up and down again. This time his hand came up to tug on his collar as he did. His adam's apple bobbed. "Why don't you let me show you how to log in? I'm kind of an expert at telnet."

He was a little creepy in an over-compensating kind of way. Penny was in no mood for his ingratiating smile or his comically smooth attempts at offering to help her peck at a keyboard. She thanked him, then retraced her steps back to the elevator. Halfway there, she could still feel his eyes on her. There was a heavy metal door to her left for one of the staircases and she pushed through and rushed down the steps, cursing the whole way down to the basement. The day was bad enough without delusional lotharios roaming the halls.

Cooper was hunched over his desk when she burst through the office door, totally steamed and ready to lay into him.

"What the hell's the big idea?" she fumed. The papers in her hand rustled like dried leaves when she brandished them in his direction. "I could have just done this online!"

He didn't so much as look at her, just kept paging through something on his computer screen. "Yes, but then you wouldn't have been out of the office long enough for me to attempt one more time to refuse your assignment."

"I had to go all over this damn building, and— Wait, what?"

Another two pages flashed past on his screen before she realized he wasn't going to answer. Penny dropped the papers in front of him and flopped into the chair at the desk she'd claimed.

"What did they say?"

"They said no, obviously, or you'd already be on your way back to wherever they found you."

" _Duh_." Penny would have said more but as she stared at the back of his head, she remembered that she'd already pressed her luck far enough for one day. And, she reminded herself for the umpteenth time, for all intents and purposes, he was her boss.

For the time being, anyway. If she didn't do what Director Gablehauser wanted, it'd be back to Quantico before she had a chance to kiss her ass goodbye. But... Maybe it wouldn't be such a big deal to type up a report when the wild goose chase was over. Cooper obviously knew they were gunning for him — he _had_ been the first to bring up the real reason why she was assigned here in the first place.

And he'd hardly flinched when she called him Moonpie, even though Penny regretted her bitchy tone the second it slipped out.

She swung the chair around and tucked her legs under her desk. The keyboard was gritty with dust and the ancient monitor took a good forty-five seconds to flicker to blurry life.

"So how do I get to the intranet on this terminal?" she asked the wall. "Somebody said something about telnet?"

Behind her, Cooper heaved a sigh that sounded like it nearly broke him in half.

\---

"Wait, what do you mean you're going to Oregon? _Tomorrow?_ I thought they pulled you out to be a secretary or something."

Over the phone, with no clue to his body language, Penny couldn't decide whether Kurt was more confused or angry. Or distracted by whatever game he had on the TV. In the months since they broke up, she'd lost whatever little ability she ever had for translating what he said into what he meant.

"Yeah, Kurt, they spent six weeks doing a background check so they could train me to do somebody's typing."

"Well, what am I supposed to do now? I need your car so I can go pick up the kegs."

A deep breath and counting to ten didn't do much to temper her irritation. "You could try paying to get your car out of the shop? Just a thought."

But he was already done listening to anything she said. Typical. "Didn't I tell you this whole thing was a scam? Who works for the FBI anyway?"

From past experience — years and years of it — Penny knew frustrated groans, cursing, and outright shrieking were all lost on him. She settled for flipping the bird through the windows in his general direction, distance be damned. She still had to finish doing laundry, not to mention figuring out what to pack for a bizarre nothing of a case with a complete weirdo for a partner. And on top of all that, a late dinner of ramen noodles and frozen peas hadn't put so much as a dent in the pain settling in for the long haul just behind her eyes.

A headache was the last thing she needed. No, actually, getting assigned to the craziest person in the Bureau was the last thing she needed, but that was already covered. She definitely didn't need an infuriating conversation with her ex piled on top of everything else.

She let her shoulders slump and frustration bleed into her voice. "I told you last month you can't borrow my car anymore. Why are you really calling?"

"Baby," he started, as though the last five minutes and eight months and a million similar conversations had never happened. Penny steeled herself against his wheedling tone, something that had gotten a hell of a lot easier since the day she walked in to find him in bed, with the next-door neighbor riding his face and panting like her lungs were about to give out.

Kurt kept going, something about how much he missed her body — not _her_ , just her body. And her car, obviously. It was the same pitch he'd been giving her for months, almost word for word. She tried to cut him off but he wasn't any more inclined to listen than he'd ever been. The receiver was too big to fit comfortably between her chin and shoulder without getting neck cramps, and meant that she could only catch about one word in three, but she went for it anyway. Her suitcase wasn't going to pack itself and it wasn't like he needed any kind of response to keep him going.

The new call signal chimed. Kurt didn't even pause when the operator cut in.

"Ma'am, I got a 703-555-1181 on the line for you."

Penny didn't recognize the number, but she never was one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

"I'll take it," she told the operator. "Tell the other line I had to go and we'll, ugh. We'll talk when I get back?"

The operator laughed. "How about I just hang up on him?"

Penny grinned. "Works for me."

There was another brief pause, then a hum as the operator disengaged and a clunk as the new line connnected. "Hello?"

"Change of plans," a familiar voice announced with no preliminaries. "Pick me up at six am."

The call disconnected abruptly, almost cutting off the last syllable. Penny flipped another rude gesture, this time toward Alexandria, then dropped the phone back on its cradle and went to rummage through the kitchen cabinets. If life didn't totally hate her, at least one magnificent piece of chocolate had survived her absence.

\---

Cooper was waiting on the curb when she pulled up in front of his building with two minutes to spare. The suit he'd worn in the office the previous day was gone, which surprised her. She almost expected to find out he slept in it, buttoned to the neck and wrists, his shoes neatly lined up next to the bed with the laces flipped inside. Instead, he was wearing a pair of olive-green corduroy pants — criminal in the muggy early summer heat that blanketed the metro area. His sweater was light-weight, with hideous purple and brown stripes, and a lime-green hem peeked out the bottom. It was ridiculous but oddly suited to his lanky frame and close-cropped hair.

Thin-lipped, he swung his overnight bag into the trunk when she popped it open, then gingerly sat in the passenger seat.

"Are you sure the rust will hold together all the way to Baltimore?"

Penny didn't dignify that with a response, but when Cooper turned to wrestle with his seatbelt strap, she gave the steering wheel a reassuring pat. They'd been through three moves across seven states together. The rust would hold together.

Even at such an early hour, traffic was starting to build. They were three cars back from a red light when Cooper finally stopped fussing with his seatbelt.

"Turn left at the next light," he commanded.

"But Baltimore's in the completely opposite direction! I thought you were in such a hurry to get us on an earlier flight."

"I never said that."

"Yeah, you did. You said we were leaving early, otherwise I'd still be asleep!"

"No, I said, 'pick me up at six.' I didn't say anything about our flight, which is still scheduled depart at ten. We have a stop to make first. Turn left."

She did, speeding up through the turn so his elbow clunked against the door. Penny swallowed a grin.

He kept giving directions one step at a time. After twenty minutes or so, when they passed the same park but from a different direction, she stopped trying to convince him to just tell her where they were headed. Another twenty minutes had them headed down a strip of faded asphalt in the middle of an industrial park that had clearly seen better days.

As the approached the last cluster of buildings, Cooper said, "Turn in here. The code for the gate is four eights."

"Four-eight what? How many digits?"

"No, eight-eight-eight-eight. Four of them."

She punched the four and then an eight. From the passenger seat there was a noise like a kettle getting ready to boil over.

As she hit he cancel button, she griped, "You owe me so much coffee for this."

"I don't purchase mood-altering drugs," he said, his voice as prim as her grandma.

The gate swung open ahead of the car. The drive and parking lot were cracked and pitted, with a few random patches of newer tar here and there like someone had tried and given up in a hurry.

Cooper had her back into a parking space near the front door and was out of the car almost before she cut the engine. She hurried after him.

They passed a steel door set in the front of the building, a dark narrow window to one side with a shiny alarm company sticker in the corner. He led her around the side, to a small loading dock flanked on each side by a set of wooden steps. Identical at first glance, it was only after Cooper passed up the first that Penny noticed the wires snaking along the risers. What the hell was this place?

A hinged door went from one set of stairs to the other, almost twice as wide as the dock and at least twenty feet tall. The roof of the building was only another foot or two above that, reminding Penny of the hangars at the municipal airfield near her parents' farm.

"What are we doing here?"

Cooper ignored her. He knocked on the door, four times in rapid succession, then a short pause, then four times again. He repeated the sequence twice more, then let his arm fall to his side. Penny scanned the length of the building. There were no less than three security cameras. They spanned at least a decade or more of technological obsolescence, from a boxy tan casing the size of a shoebox to a bulky gray model that she remembered from the last ride-along she'd done with her brother. Doubtless there even were more that she didn't see.

The parking lot that wrapped around the front of the building extended only a few more feet beyond the ramp to the dock, then gave way to a pitted field with grass gone to seed. The tops, frothy and delicate, swayed back and forth in no particular pattern.

She checked her watch. They'd been idling on the stairs for almost five minutes, and nothing seemed to be happening inside or out. She looked over her shoulder. Cooper had his head tilted to one side, his lips moving a tiny bit. His eyes were closed and he startled when she spoke.

"Are we here for any particular reason?"

He held up a single finger and turned back to the door. Four more knocks, and suddenly gears started grinding. The door slid upward, creaking at each hinge and squeaking along tracks that sounded like they were about twenty years overdue for oiling.

"Cooper," came a voice from inside, nasal and peeved. "How many times do I have to tell you: you can't just come over whenever you feel like it! Howard and Raj—"

A man emerged from the gloom, blinking against the light and cleaning a pair of glasses on his flannel robe. He stopped short, stopped talking, stopped rubbing the lenses. Penny tensed. What if something had snuck up behind them? Shit, she'd barely even glanced at the perimeter, never mind checking to make sure it really was just wind in the grass. This close to the District, there wasn't much danger of any extra-tee activity, but even the Terror couldn't be everywhere at once. She'd heard enough stories to make the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

But there was nothing. No lights, no hot winds, no shadows shifting out of her own, nothing at all, just the guy standing stock-still in the entrance, staring at her —

Oh.

She pushed her sunglasses up to the top of her head — the better to see him — and thrust out a hand. "Sorry to bust in on you like this. I'm Agent P—"

Cooper's elbow jostled against hers as he moved in between them. "Leonard, you can make a fool of yourself over her later. Show me what you found."

He brushed past Leonard and marched toward the far wall, where a fire door was propped open with what looked like something out of the inside of a computer. Leonard shrugged and put his glasses back on, offered a shy smile that seemed aimed somewhere to the left of her face, then followed in his wake. He hurried to keep up with Cooper's long-legged pace. The red checks on the robe clashed with the neon purple and muddy brown stripes on Cooper's sweater, and Penny thought of Bert and Ernie delicately gliding from one side of their apartment living room to the other, wires and sticks just visible when the light caught them right.

She jumped when the door overhead clanged and groaned, starting the return trip at some silent, invisible signal.

"Any time today!" Cooper yelled back at her as the two men slipped through the door, Leonard gesturing wildly as they went.

\---

It was like stepping into another world. The first she'd seen of the inside of the warehouse was vast and echoing. Dimly lit, with catwalks and metal lamps high overhead. It was chilly and smelled stale, like it had been sealed up too long. Penny half-expected to see someone skulking out of the shadows with boxes of secret documents or test tubes or something equally inexplicable.

Through the inner door, though.... The first area she walked through was more of a wide corridor than a room, with blank walls and carpeted with a thin gray fabric like the one she so despised at the Felt. Metal shelving units marched down the length of the room, covering all but the top few feet of unpainted drywall. The shelves were the kind that echoed with a dull ringing whenever anyone so much as brushed a sleeve against them, a warning to keep your voice down and yourself to yourself. Binders filled every available inch of the units, flat blues and blacks with hand-written labels yellowed with age.

Bare fluorescent fixtures on the drop ceiling bathed the room in light like that at the top of an aquarium, watery and greenish and with a tendency to wash out even the most vibrant colors. The room was laid out in an elongated 'L', with another fire door at the end. This one had a number pad installed above the handle, but it too was propped open. Penny thought the doorstop could have been a fax machine in a previous life.

The next room looked like some evil genius's lab threw up in a frat house kitchen, then invited the neighborhood kids in to throw a party.

Through the opening, she could see Leonard rushing around as he gathered up trash and dirty dishes from every available surface, only to look around helplessly for somewhere to put them once he had. "You should have called, Cooper. I could have cleaned up!"

Cooper was already folded into a chair, bowed forward over a miniature computer terminal opened on the desk in front of him. His head swiveled back and forth between its emerald-green readout, the larger display on the wall in front of him, and a fat manila folder open on the desk to the left of his elbow.

"Why?" he asked, sounding a million miles away.

"So we don't look like pigs in front of your partner! Howard said he met her but he did _not_ mention how beautiful she was."

Cooper snorted. "I find that hard to believe. Now, can we get back to business or will you need more time to moon over my _temporary_ partner, though she's hardly worthy of even that designation?"

"I think I'd like to moon some more, if you don't mind."

"Well, I do. Where did you get this information?"

Penny waited until they were engrossed in a conversation about calling in favors and something to do with trading melee points, then stepped into the room.

Without turning, Cooper snapped, "Finally. Come here and tell me what you think of this."

Leonard whirled around, almost dropped a dirty plate, and scuttled away with a sheepish look.

When she leaned over Cooper's shoulder, he flinched away, putting a good ten inches of space between them. Penny straightened abruptly, feeling blood rush into her face and not really sure why. He thrust a handful of photographs at her, then rolled his chair another six inches away from her and turned the terminal toward his new position.

She flipped through the blurry black and white images. One was an aerial shot of a field, a cluster of large boulders marking what was probably a boundary corner. The next two were of crowned country roads, thin bright lines bisecting the cracked and faded pavement that sloped down into overgrown ditches. After that were single shots of individual's faces, dark button eyes in doughy faces, noses like sharp blades or lumpy potatoes, mouths narrowed and frowning. Everyone looked pale, unfocused, like their edges were still undefined, or steadily moving in that direction. Like they'd been worn through, ground down, by the wind and rain, by anger and sorrow and joy. The black and white made her think of winter, as though these people were emerging from the cold, the snow and frost leaching the color from them in fits and starts until their skin marbled like a corpse, blue and white and gray.

Jesus, she thought. She was starting to sound like one of her mom's favorite soothsayers, the kind who delighted in the shivers that rippled through the audience.

Penny had about as much psychic ability as a toad, for all her hoping and wishing for it as a girl still sighing over unicorns and magnetary medicine. Which wasn't to say that she didn't still believe in unicorns and magnets but she hoped it was tempered by all she'd learned since then, about what else was possible in the world. More importantly, about what was worth believing in.

She dropped the pictures on the desk with a shrug. "Looks like regular stuff."

Cooper looked up, his jaw dropped just a fraction of an inch. Just enough for her to see the sharp white edges of his teeth and the soft pink of his tongue.

" _What_?"

He cleared his throat, went back to staring fixedly at whatever held him in thrall to the terminal screen. "Would it change your reaction to know that those were taken in and around Pasadena on the days the first and second victims...." He trailed off for a moment, then said, "Disappeared and were later found." But his voice was entirely too deliberate, too forceful in pushing out the words to believe that they were his first choice.

She looked again, scanning faces, looking at collars and coats. The clothes were a little outdated, maybe, the hairstyles too, but that was common for small towns. From the look of Cooper when he wasn't wearing a suit, she doubted he had even noticed.

"I don't know," she said after she'd gone through the whole stack again. "I don't see anything."

"Exactly!" he cried, jumping to his feet. He tucked in his elbows and started pacing, his hands sketching something in the air in front of him as he went. "No crop circles, no scorch marks. No roadblocks. No police presence on the roads at all, actually."

Cooper halved the distance between them and pointed at the face in the top-most picture. His nails were trimmed short with blunt angles at the corners, as though he took a pair of kitchen scissors to them whenever the thought struck. He tapped the pale, tapered tip of his finger against the fleshy, gray face. "Does he look frightened? Curious?"

"No," she said slowly, peering down at the sagging jowls and under-eye bags. The man looked tired, careworn. His head was down, his eyes hooded and trained on the ground. The collar of his coat was turned up against the wind; corduroy, darker than the fabric under it: Penny knew a Carhartt when she saw it. He could have been anyone from her hometown, making his way around the square before returning home to check on the stock or the crops.

"It looks like he's had a long day, but nothing out of the ordinary."

She looked up in time to catch the look of triumph that whipped across Cooper's face before he shuttered it, sliding back behind his mask of barely polite disinterest. He nodded and took the pictures from her, carefully clipped them to the inside cover of the folder.

Penny waited for him to elaborate on what the hell he was doing. Why it was so important that they detour here, to this creepy bunker in the middle of nowhere. Why some guy was hovering behind them in a _bathrobe_ while her temporary partner-slash-supervisor-slash-pain-in-the-ass made himself comfortable and said two words when she wanted twenty.

He bent over the terminal again, dismissing her without a word. Penny glared at the back of his head — an expression that was growing a little too easy to muster.

Leonard cleared his throat, then gave a tiny cough. "Can I, uh, do you want coffee? We've got regular, decaf, arabica. Half-caf's not a problem, either! Easy to do, just mix regular and decaf, and there you go. I mean, you already know that, I'm sure. Everybody knows that."

He probably would have gone on all day if Penny hadn't smiled, causing his rambling to jump the tracks and send him back to staring at her face, mute and a little starry-eyed.

"Coffee would be great, thanks." She made a face and twirled a finger in the air. "And, uh, the bathroom?"

His face paled, eyes darting quickly to the side. "It's, uh, well. I don't know if you— It's not exactly fit for company either."

If his panicked expression was any indicator, she could definitely hold it. Maybe giving the coffee a pass wasn't such a bad idea either, come to think of it.

Cooper rolled the chair back from the desk. The terminal was powering down, a glowing indicator ticking across the screen, and he'd anchored the manila folder next to it with another of the omnipresent coffee mugs.

"Leonard, send all of this to my—" He shot a suspicious look at Penny. "You know where to send it. We have to go."

"Hey, hang on, we've got plenty of time to have a cup of coffee," Penny protested. Her reluctance to ingest anything out of Leonard's kitchen paled in comparison to her desire to give as good as she got from her obnoxious, _temporary_ partner. "He was nice enough not to shoot you this early in the morning."

His glare wasn't getting any meaner, but it wasn't for a lack of trying.

Penny snapped her fingers. "Hey, here's an idea. Since Leonard already went to all the trouble of printing this for you, why don't you just _take the folder_?" She reached around him to make a grab for it but his hand got there first and pushed it out of reach.

"No, it's fine," Leonard cut in, probably to distract her from throwing Cooper down and stepping over him to get the file herself. "It's probably safer if you don't get caught with it. I'll take care of it today."

She looked at both men, wondering what silent conversation she was missing. "What else is in there? The pictures aren't anything incriminating."

Cooper didn't answer, just turned and headed for the door through which they'd entered. Penny made a face at his back.

"I'm really sorry about this," she said to Leonard.

He waved it off. "You get used to it."

When she smiled, he squared his shoulders and trained his eyes somewhere in the middle of her forehead. "Listen, maybe when you get back, we could go for coffee sometime? My treat!"

He seemed nice but he wasn't really her type — pretty much the opposite of it, actually — so she said she'd call when the case was done instead of agreeing outright. Maybe between now and then she'd come up with a way to let him down gently. Leonard scribbled his number, his backup number, and three different mailing addresses on a piece of paper and thrust it in her hand as she turned to go.

Cooper was waiting in the outer room, the tapping of his foot echoing dully off all the shelving. "Finally," he muttered.

Leonard didn't follow them out, but Cooper seemed to be familiar with the mechanism that disabled the alarm ( _alarms_ , Penny corrected herself. She couldn't imagine there was only one) and opened the huge door. He stood in front of the control panel in such a way that his body blocked most of it from her view, but it took less than ten seconds before the motors engaged and the hinges started to creak.

He waved her out ahead of him, then hit something on the panel and followed. As they walked back to her car, he said, "If you aren't interested, you shouldn't let him get his hopes up."

Penny stopped dead in the middle of the blacktop. It was a good thing her pistol was secured in her luggage, or she might have shot him right then and there.

Cooper kept going. There was no hesitation to his stride at all, despite the fact that he'd turned his back on someone he'd done his best to antagonize — albeit mostly unintentionally — and who still held the keys to the locked car he was zeroing in on.

"Maybe I am interested," she yelled.

He snorted.

Penny beeped the locks and stalked to the driver's side door. She couldn't decide who to be angry with over for his ridiculous assumption: him for having it, or her for knowing it was right.

\---

Their first flight was uneventful, once Cooper had bullied the flight attendants into catering to his ridiculous demands.

"Can I see the case notes again?" Penny asked when he was finally situated to his satisfaction, after at least an hour and a half in the air. If he twisted in his seat one more time, she was going to chuck him out the emergency exit.

" _Can_ you?"

" _Yeah_ , can I?"

"No, you may not."

Mostly uneventful, Penny corrected in her mental notes. She would leave out the part about requesting to be moved to a new seat so she didn't murder her partner.

\---

They changed planes in Dallas; their flight plan might have made sense to a lunatic, but it certainly didn't make sense to Penny. Not long after takeoff, Cooper finally fell asleep on his newest just-unwrapped and presumably still sanitized-for-his-protection airline pillow.

Penny peeled her fingers from the armrest between them, shaking out the stiffness as her hands slowly uncurled. For years her reputation had been no-nonsense, ready-for-anything. A tomboy, albeit one who never met a pink she didn't like. But there were still some things that had her quaking in her dozens of pairs of shoes, flying being chief among them. She'd grown up hearing too many stories: mid-air abductions, planes that vanished, the cousin who swore she witnessed an extra-tee ship that brought down a commercial jet. And that didn't even touch the impossibility of man-made tubes of metal flying through the air in the first place. The world had changed a lot, but something as simple as air travel — something that pre-dated the revelations, even — made zero sense to her.

She gave the flight attendant a grateful smile when the woman handed her a full can of diet soda and a small bottle of vodka. Maria was printed on the wing-shaped name tag on her tight blue vest.

Cooper had been calling her Miss Stewardess.

"On the house," Maria told Penny. Under the recently refreshed makeup it looked like her angry flush was still fading, leaving patches of bright color high on her cheekbones and brightening her eyes. "Not that anyone would blame you, but you wouldn't believe the paperwork if you pushed him out in mid-flight."

There was a general rumble of disappointment from the passengers around them who'd been subjected to Cooper's irritated, irritating, and high-handed manner before he succumbed to the Ambien Penny dropped in his ginger ale just after they boarded.

Before the last seats were filled, Cooper had already unwrapped and shaken out a tiny airline blanket in the aisle — whipping it into the faces of at least three of their fellow passengers — and draped it over himself. He struggled for a few minutes, fussing with the blanket the whole time before giving up. The thin square of fabric barely reached his lap, kept in place by one corner tucked into the crook of his elbow. His legs were jammed up against the seat in front of him, with his knees raised up almost as high as his chin.

Penny caught her breath the first time he slammed a kneecap into the latched tray table. She expected him to pitch a fit, full of demands and regurgitated passenger safety guidelines the way he had on the first flight. But he only grimaced and squirmed until he could slide his feet under the carry-on bag he had stuffed under the seat. Squinting through the gap between seats, she saw a strip of pink scalp partially obscured by wisps of soft white hair and a chunky knot of gold dangling from an elongated earlobe. The woman turned her head, revealing the loose, papery skin at her jaw and an unobtrusive hearing aid as she smiled at her companion.

After a few more minutes of Cooper's restless fidgeting, Penny muttered and started to stand, crouching under the overhead bin and reaching over to get the woman's attention. Rudeness be damned, she couldn't take another second of his thrashing.

Before she could speak, Cooper caught her elbow and dragged her back down into her seat.

"Just tell her to move her seat back," she hissed. He let go of her arm sooner than she expected and she cracked her other elbow into the narrow window.

"I'm fine," he protested, looking nothing but as he shifted yet again. He kicked the bag under the seat in front of him.

"But—"

"I'm not going to make someone's meemaw move just to give me another two inches of space."

She thought he was joking at first; he'd done nothing but insist on his comfort to the exclusion of everyone else almost from the moment they met. But his face flushed once the words burst out of him in a furious whisper, and he turned away and closed his eyes. Within minutes his breathing slowed and his expression softened as the drugs kicked in.

Penny kept an eye on him to make sure he was really out. She took a swig of vodka from the bottle, leaving the diet soda untouched in case she needed to drop another pill.

In sleep, Cooper looked almost normal, if you didn't notice his rigid posture and the peculiar way his arms folded over his chest. His head lolled against the pillow wedged between him and the seat back, his long neck fully exposed. His mouth dropped open, enough to make his breath audible but not quite enough to tip him over into snoring. There were dark shadows under his eyes that she hadn't noticed before, and creases across his forehead and around his eyes. A half-day's growth of hair shadowed his jaw and chin, patchy in places. He probably wouldn't have a full beard if he did let it grow.

She thought he was somewhere in his early thirties, but like this he looked almost a decade younger, closer to her own age. Even under the harsh lights of the cabin — the same lights that turned her reflection into a horror show in the cramped bathroom of the last plane.

Twenty minutes later, Penny was flagging down Maria for another tiny bottle. Cooper had moved only a little in his sleep, slumping ever so slightly toward her. But his folded arms had slipped, the blanket drifting farther down into his lap. He looked more like a regular guy, at last, and less like a tightly-wrapped mummy she was trying to smuggle across the country. She hoped he wasn't a snorer; his mouth drooped farther open with every minute.

When Maria brought the vodka, Penny said, "Can you let me know when you're ready to do the cart so I can get his elbow out of the aisle? He should be down for the count, but just in case...."

Maria checked her watch. "We should be starting the snack service in about five or ten minutes." She carefully reached over Cooper and touched Penny's wrist. "Thank you for whatever you did to knock him out. He's flagged on the passenger manifest as a nuisance but, well. None of us had any idea just how bad it would be in real life."

It was the weirdest thing. Listening to Maria say exactly what Penny had been thinking while Cooper slept between them, she had an almost irresistible urge to defend him while he couldn't do it for himself. He was rude, sure. An abrasive, condescending, smug, infuriating jackass — did she mention rude? But then there had been that minuscule flinch when she called him Moonpie, and the whispers that followed him across the campus that time she'd seen him at Quantico.

She bit down on the side of her tongue and smiled at the flight attendant, grateful when she moved away to answer a summons a few rows behind of them. When they brought out the cart and started up the aisle, Penny rearranged the tiny blanket to capture both of his arms across his chest. She leaned over to tuck the edge of the blanket in between his hip and the armrest and nearly toppled over on top of him when someone tapped her on the back and cooed, "Oh, doesn't he look precious?"

Penny pushed off of him and plopped back down in her own seat. The old woman sitting in front of Cooper was turned around in her seat. The only part of her that was visible over the seat back was the top of her head, from just under her eyes up to the wispy twist of hair on top of her head.

"My husband used to do that," she said. "That man could have fallen asleep on top of a freight train. Just sit him down and he was out like a light."

"Oh! We're not—" Penny rushed to say.

"Have you been married long?"

"No! We're—"

"Oh, on your honeymoon then? Isn't that sweet! I'll leave you alone then." She gave Penny an obnoxious wink. As she turned around to face forward again, she stuck a finger in her ear and twisted. There was a loud squeaking noise as her hearing aid powered down.

A couple who did look like they were headed for a honeymoon beamed at her from across the aisle, then looked back at Penny. They held up their hands, waggling their ring fingers almost in unison.

"Congratulations," she said weakly, then sank back into her seat and tried to hide behind Cooper's shoulder without actually touching him. Was everyone in the world insane and she'd only just started noticing?

Hiding didn't last long. With nothing else to do she found herself staring out the window, directly into the huge turbine dangling from the ridiculously fragile-looking wing. Wisps of cloud streamed over and under the metal, sometimes looking so much like smoke that her heart leapt up into her throat. The flight attendants rolled back up the aisle, collecting empty cups and pretzel bags as they went. Penny waited until they passed and the 'fasten seatbelts' light dinged off, then unclipped hers and leaned forward. She'd stuck her magazine in her bag as she juggled her badge and plane ticket, then threw the whole thing in the bin overhead without thinking. So now she was stuck either imagining their imminent death by Canada goose or reading the fascinating SkyMall catalog that had half the pages ripped out. There wasn't even a barf bag in the pouch under her tray table.

Cooper shifted. The blanket came untucked and his elbow emerged again, sticking a good three inches out into the aisle. Penny grabbed at his sleeve and he jerked when her fingers brushed against the skin of his wrist. One foot kicked out, dislodging the bag wedged under the seat in front of him.

When he was settled again, Penny leaned forward and carefully pulled the bag free. She had intended to just move it to her side, to give him more room, but found herself unzipping the front compartment instead. She pulled out a folder and twisted the release on her tray so she could spread out the documents.

Sneaking glances at him every few seconds to make sure he wasn't about to catch her snooping, she went through everything in the small carry-on bag. There wasn't anything particularly interesting, just some newspaper clippings from around the country and case files that didn't seem to have anything to do with the two dead bodies in Pasadena.

The intercom came on and the captain mumbled something about descent, then the seatbelts sign lit up. Penny stuffed everything back into Cooper's bag and stowed it at her feet. She buckled herself in and closed her eyes, hoping it would deter Maria from trying to commiserate with her again as she made a last check of the cabin before landing.

A week ago, Penny had been exhausted, frustrated, a little hungover. Bored silly. Then: exhilarated, once she got the news that she was wanted at the Felt. Terrified, nervous... It seemed like she'd run through every possible emotion by the time she reported to Director Gablehauser's office.

She showed up almost twenty minutes early, a heroic feat given the delays reported all along the Camden line. But Gablehauser's secretary, a prune-faced woman with a shock of red hair, left her cooling her heels for another fifteen after her appointment time. When she was finally ushered into the inner office, a cloying, sickly-sweet smell almost made her gag.

Gablehauser was everything his reputation promised, all slick and hustle with even white teeth and too orange a tan to be anything but artificial. His hair was perfect, slicked back with what had to be industrial-strength product and probably a little gray-covering color as well. He stood when Penny entered, offered her a hand to shake — complete with index finger gliding over the inside of her wrist as he let go. He held on to the back of her chair as she sat, as though they were in the middle of a restaurant and he was checking out the view down her dress.

There was another man in the office, leaning against the wall in between a shaded window and a tall filing cabinet. Judging by the height of the window, he was just under six feet, with brown hair and a full beard. He nodded at Penny but didn't introduce himself. Gablehauser didn't introduce him either, keeping his full attention focused on Penny for most of the next two hours.

It felt more like two days.

The conversation started out normal enough, getting-to-know-you kind of stuff that she'd expected. Gablehauser was careful not to look like he was prying, careful to stick to questions that a human resources representative would have found tame. In the corner behind him, the other man drummed his fingers on the cabinet and shifted from one foot to the other. After twenty minutes or so, he cleared his throat and reached into his pants pocket to pull out a pack of cigarettes.

Gablehauser turned to look at him for the first time, opened his mouth to say something and then shut it just as quickly and turned back to Penny with a pained smile.

The smoker came out of his corner and dropped into the chair next to Penny. He tapped his lighter against the paper and cellophane pack balanced on his knee, and Gablehauser tore a drawer open with what sounded like a curse under his breath. He rummaged around for a few seconds, then pulled out a glass ashtray and shoved it across the desk so hard it would have flown off the end if the smoker hadn't caught it.

"Gee, thanks," he sneered. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

Penny couldn't stop herself. "Do you mind?"

"Relax, sweetheart, they're cloves," he said, disdain dropping away from every word the way ashes floated down to coat his shirt and lap before he brushed them into gray smears.

It just went downhill from there. While Penny was still bristling, Gablehauser took advantage of her distraction to press his offer. He told her in no uncertain terms that the only reason she'd been pulled from the training course was because they needed her for one thing, and one thing only.

The Creepy Clove Smoker smirked.

"Ignore him," Gablehauser barked. "I'm the one who calls the shots here, Agent. And I'm the one who decides whether your career lives or dies. If Agent Cooper so much as sneezes without a handkerchief, I want to know it before you're done wiping the snot off your face."

In her lap, her hands balled into fists. She fought to keep her expression neutral.

Gablehauser sat back and smoothed down his red silk tie, then stacked his hands on top of his head. He smiled, the white of his teeth jarring against his orangey skin. "Of course, if you play along, there's no telling how far you'll go."

\---

The drive to Pasadena took almost three hours. Without seeing a map, she couldn't be sure but Penny was convinced it had taken twice as long as should have. At a minimum. One thing they hadn't covered in training was how to convince a senior agent to drive more than twenty-five miles an hour.

"Maybe they should add a course in how not to get intoxicated on airplanes," Cooper shot back.

Or maybe she could get special tutoring in How To Keep Your Mouth Shut For A Change.

Cooper signaled a turn that Penny had to squint to make out. It was at least a hundred yards away. Maybe two. She'd never been great at judging distances; it was a lot easier to gauge a yard when it was already marked on the field for you.

"Those bottles are bigger than they look, bub." She smoothed the seatbelt already lying flat across her chest. "Bub, _sir_."

Apparently his unscheduled nap restored his glare to full strength. Penny swiped at her cheek to get it off.

The turn Cooper was aiming for took them onto First Street and right down through the main business district. She recognized most of the buildings from the slide show and tried to snap to attention. Contrary to what she let Cooper think, her alcohol tolerance was pretty high — a handy side effect of a misspent youth and a healthy appetite for a good time. At most, she was feeling warm and cozy from the travel-sized bottles Maria had handed over free of charge. Her head and vision were still clear.

Even the frustration of crawling down the highway at speeds that would embarrass her grandma didn't chap her ass too much. Which, when she thought about it, was a pretty good sign that maybe she _wasn't_ as sober as she thought.

The blinker came on as they crossed Front Street, creeping around the giant fish sculpture someone had plunked down in the middle of a perfectly good intersection. Penny glanced at the directions Cooper had pulled from a file folder and clipped to the dashboard with some gadget he fished out of a pocket. Their motel, the Pasadena Inn, was on Tillamook, more than a mile away. A small line of text under the motel's fifties-looking logo caught her eye.

"It says check-in isn't until eight." She lifted the corner of the page to read the radio's clock. It was just after three, local time. Which she knew was as exact as it could be; he refused to turn on the engine until he'd reset and recalibrated every single gadget and readout in the entire car. "We've got five hours, Cooper."

He slapped her hand away, slowing even further as he did. "You _can_ tell time! I wondered, this morning."

"So, where are we going?"

"The motel."

"For what?"

"To check in."

New Year's was too far off, so Penny had made a New State resolution instead: to not let him get under her skin. It wasn't going as well as she'd hoped.

"Why don't we check in at the police department first? Instead of pissing off the people who are going to be cleaning our toilets for the next few days?"

"'Cleaning our toilets'," he repeated with a snicker. "Good one."

It felt like she'd left her brain somewhere over Boulder or back home in Maryland. Maybe the vodka hadn't been such a good idea. Maybe it was more potent when you guzzled it in mid-air as you tried to keep from jumping out of your skin every time something creaked.

Cooper pulled up to the motel's lobby entrance and turned off the car. Penny waited in the car, pretending to be engrossed in picking at the nail polish on her fingernails while he went in to check them in early.

The front doors were propped open with a concrete block and a large concrete ashtray. A dusty display window next to the doors gave a good view of the dingy-looking lobby in all its harvest gold and orange, plaid and paisley splendor. A stocky, well-built man was hunched over the desk, his dark hair smoothed down with some kind of product. He straightened as Cooper approached, but he didn't smile.

As Penny watched, the clerk's face got redder and redder. She wished she'd learned how to read lips somewhere along the way. Finally it looked like the clerk was able to get a word in edgewise. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, narrowed his eyes, and then bent back down to whatever he'd been doing before they pulled up.

Cooper came storming out less than ten seconds later, muttering under his breath and glaring at the man through the window.

"No dice?" Penny asked as he started adjusting his seat and mirrors again. She wasn't even trying to disguise her smug tone.

"We'll check in with local law enforcement first," Cooper said, as if that had been his plan all along.

\---

"Didn't know they let the feebs leave DC," someone mock-whispered behind Penny.

She whirled around to give whoever it was a piece of her mind but couldn't tell which of the fat, stupid, local cops was the culprit. They were all smirking. Snickering into their mustaches or multiple chins. If only they'd arrived in Pasadena a few hours earlier, she thought. She didn't doubt for a second that that very morning there would have been a cloud of powdered sugar hanging in the air as they chortled over their totally hilarious snide comments.

Maybe she should have stuck with waitressing. At least there you got tipped sometimes.

Cooper was standing on the other side of the room by the fingerprint and photo station. He had a thin folder open in his hands and another waiting on the counter, the sum total of the local investigation into the deaths of Alicia Azlynn and David Underhill. It seemed like the FBI had invested more time and energy in getting Penny and Cooper to Pasadena than Pasadena had spent on two of its recently deceased.

The Chief of Police — who'd introduced himself as a captain for some reason — was with him, arms folded over his belly. He was a large, round man with a kind-looking face and hair that looked like it was losing a long-standing battle against male pattern baldness. As Cooper flipped through the few pages stapled to the inside cover and made his own snide comments, the Chief stood placidly by, like a cow waiting for its cud to come back up.

The man was wearing sweatpants on duty, for crying out loud.

Someone came up behind Penny and cleared their throat. She turned slightly to see a pale skinny man with curly hair. One side of his mouth quirked up in a brief smile. "So, do they even have guns in the FBI, or do you all just carry staplers around?"

Before she could spit out a retort, his smile widened into a grin and he made a gesture like he was warding her off.

"Just kidding, I swear. I'm Sussman. Stuart! Well, Detective Sussma— you can, uh, call me Stuart."

He blushed a little when she shook his hand.

"Did you guys really come all the way out here for those two abductees?"

Penny forced a smile. He looked harmless, but she'd seen his name all over the notes Cooper had let her look at before he kicked her out of the office at the Felt. Stuart Sussman was the investigating officer who had signed off on both of the tiny files Cooper was looking through. Not that it meant anything in a town this small. He was probably the investigating officer on half of the cases that passed through the station.

She wasn't sure how to respond — _had_ they come all this way just for these two people? There were hundreds of extra-tee abductions and dumps across the country every year, maybe thousands, and the Terror had a veritable army to handle them. What was it that Cooper found so interesting about these two? And what did he think he could do about it? He was just a basement-dwelling burnout, with a reputation for weirdness that was dwarfed the respect he earned in his short time as an analyst. Come to think of it, she wondered, how had he even gotten clearance to take on this nothing of a case?

And where did all this leave her?

The silence stretched out until the very air between them felt brittle. She wasn't the only one to notice, either. Stuart made an awkward gesture toward the desks, gave her a sheepish smile, and excused himself.

Penny felt her head turn to watch him go but not much else registered. She barely remembered his question, and couldn't have answered it even if she wanted to. Her breath caught in her throat at the realization that no matter what she did here, her career at the FBI was destined to be a very short one. Like her dad used to say, she was screwed if she did and screwed worse if she didn't. Gablehauser hadn't pulled her out of the Academy to set her on the fast-track to an office on the top floor, no matter what promises he'd made about what she could expect if she fell in line.

The director hitched her star to a black hole, and there wasn't a single damn thing she could do about it.

She stalked over to Cooper and snatched the folder away. A quick glance showed that the locals had far less information than what Cooper had gathered, in a much shorter time and at a considerable distance. She looked over at the chief, whose expression hadn't changed one bit.

She smiled. "I don't suppose we could take a look at the dump site, could we?"

His brow furrowed for a second, then he hitched up his sweatpants. Penny tried not to notice when the drawstring, already precarious, threatened to give way altogether. From the look of things, the chief should have traded up a size or two a few dozen doughnuts ago.

Cooper gave her a strange look over the man's shoulder.

"What? There is still a dump site, isn't there?"

"Of course there's still a dump site," Cooper said. He added a lifted eyebrow and tilted his head toward the chief, whose features had smoothed back out into a pleasant, if vacant, smile.

Penny saw his eyebrow and raised him another one. Whatever that meant to him, it was apparently the right thing. He grabbed the other file folder off the counter and stepped toward her, then pivoted on his toes like a sentry at Arlington.

"We'll be on our way." His voice had taken on an oddly formal tone, at odds with the rude words that came out of his mouth next. "I'd thank you for your help, if you'd been any help at all."

The chief didn't seem to mind, though. He smiled at Cooper's rapidly retreating back, then patted Penny on the shoulder before wandering away in the opposite direction.

Stuart caught up to her at the exit. Cooper was just outside, at the top of the steps leading down to the street. He had a hand over one eye and was staring straight up at the sky. The skin of his neck stretched tight over his adam's apple. He looked like some kind of human crane, all sharp angles and disproportional limbs. She wondered how knobby his knees were.

"I'll tag along, if you don't mind," Stuart said as he held the door open for her.

"And if we do mind?" She didn't bother to disguise the bite in her voice. He might be just a small-town cop, but he wasn't anywhere near as oblivious as his boss. He knew exactly what message he was sending.

But instead of giving back as good as he got, he smiled again. "Then I guess I'd just tag along anyway."

\---

Stuart drove them out to the site in a squad car. Cooper refused to get into the back seat, so Penny found herself staring at the back of his head through the wire barrier.

For most of the drive, Stuart kept up a running monologue about the town, the people they passed, businesses that used to be where new ones were failing. Her eyes were probably starting to glaze over.

Cooper was oblivious. Early that morning when Penny thrust a map at him and told him to navigate their way from Leonard's to Baltimore, he claimed that reading in the car made him sick to his stomach. But now he was poring through the thin files again. What he was looking for, Penny couldn't even begin to guess.

They parked in a turnout that Stuart said was about half a mile from the clearing where the bodies were found. Cooper led the way down the path, his long stride taking him far ahead of her and out of sight around a bend just a few yards into the woods. Stuart trailed behind at enough of a distance that she almost forgot he was there by the time she reached the end of the trail.

Cooper was standing in the middle of a patch of the dark green growth Penny recognized from the photos. The yellow blooms had died, leaving only a few stubborn, stiff, browned flowers still clinging on here and there.

"That's right about where they were," Stuart called to her partner.

"I know. Penny, let me see your recorder."

She dug it out of her pocket. Cooper caught it easily, surprising both of them from the look on his face. He didn't acknowledge her again for a while.

When he bent low and started running his hands through the plants like he was testing something, Penny rambled around the clearing. She wanted to see if she could identify all the angles captured in the photographs. Hoping something would jump out at her, something that would let her in on why exactly Cooper had flown them all this way when it looked like every other extra-tee dump she'd ever heard of or read about.

She still hadn't found anything by the time Cooper made a satisfied noise and straightened. It was the same sound he'd made back in the office when she finally managed to get her login to work on the telnet connection. He clicked off the recorder and slipped it into the pocket of the tan windbreaker he'd added to his outfit once they landed in Oregon. At least it covered up the eye-searing shirt he had on under his sweater.

"We're done here," he announced, heading back the way they came without waiting to see if anyone would follow.

They'd been in the woods for less than ten minutes.

When they got back to the police station, at Cooper's insistence, Stuart locked the empty interview room and helped another officer drag a folding table into the adjacent observation room. Penny carried in the chairs while Cooper ignored everyone.

Once they were alone, he opened his bag and started spreading out the files he'd brought with him from DC.

"What are you—"

He cut her off. "They might still be watching. Or listening. Sit down and act like you know what you're doing."

Penny flattered herself that she was a pretty good actress when she needed to be but there was no disguising that she was completely out of her depth here. She felt like the rookie she was, flailing along behind him while he indulged in whatever crazy was in his head.

She sat. "What am I supposed to be doing?"

"Just go through the files, look like you found something every so often. Take notes," he said in a low voice.

He peered at her over the pile of metal and wires he was pulling from his bag. "Pretend you're in class: you haven't read the assignments yet and you're trying to keep the instructor from calling on you."

That Penny could do. Lord knew she had plenty of practice.

"What are you doing?"

"It would take too long to explain."

Like she had anything better to do?

While Cooper tinkered with the mess he'd made on the table, she flipped through files. Again. She'd already looked through most of them while he was passed out on the plane, and they didn't make any more sense on a second pass. It was like trying to read in a foreign language; some things looked familiar, or tickled at her brain like she should know what they meant. Every time she opened her mouth to ask him a question, he either ignored her completely or fumbled with some piece of equipment and glared.

She pinched the bridge of her nose. Her headache from the night before was starting to roar back to life.

"Can we go get something to eat after this? I haven't had anything since Dallas."

He jerked when she spoke, almost as if he'd forgotten she was there, and blinked.

"You know, food? Eat?"

"There's a Bob's Big Boy near our motel. That's why I chose it," he said, and went back to his pile of junk.

"O _kay_ ," Penny said under her breath.

Was this another test? Was he doing this on purpose to see how long it would be before she cracked? Or was this just Cooper being Cooper?

Whatever it was, she was tired of playing along by his rules. She shoved the useless files into a jumbled stack on the edge of the desk and opened the police files on the two abductees instead. When Cooper continued to ignore her, she started reading things out loud. Maybe if she annoyed him well enough, he'd get flustered and distracted long enough for her to talk him into getting out of this cramped room.

"Wow, she weighed more than me? Must have been the implants. I wonder where she got them done; Pasadena doesn't seem like the kind of place where...."

Cooper's head shot up when she trailed off. "What?"

Penny looked up. "She's not from here," she said. She yanked off the paper clip holding a tiny newspaper clipping to the back of the folder. Nothing more than a gossip column with a few lines devoted to the hot new barmaid at a local dive, it had been covered up with pages of handwritten pages that looked like someone ripped them out of a child's notebook. Cooper grabbed the clipping out of her hand, almost ripping it in his haste.

"She moved here six months ago?" He scratched his earlobe. "There was nothing about that in the files I had."

"Well, apparently you missed something."

"But I don't miss things," he protested weakly.

\---

Penny stabbed her country-fried steak again, sawing with the dull knife in an attempt to get a chewable piece bigger than the end of her finger. The overcooked meat skidded around the plate, fork scraping on the ceramic with a god-awful screech.

The woman in the next booth huffed a loud sigh. "Animals," she grumbled to no one in particular.

Penny scraped the fork again. Everything about this place got her hackles up: the grinning doll heads all around the room, the tables squeezed too close together, her partner sitting on the other side of the booth bitching about the amount of onion on his Big Boy. Her country-fried steak tasted like country-fried ass, and the gravy on her mashed potatoes looked like mucus. Her Diet Coke was flat. And if the old guy at the table by the salad bar didn't stop coughing, she was going to have to hold him down and pour water down his throat.

Cooper pushed away his plate. "This is completely inedible," he grumbled. He kept his voice down, though. Their waitress had already put the fear of God into him when he tried to return his onion rings for the third time.

He reached into his bag and pulled out one of the folders they had snuck out of the police station.

"We're not _stealing_ it," Cooper had said when Penny tried to talk him out of it. "We're borrowing it overnight in the course of our investigation, which is a permissible activity as codified in section 16.2 of the Bureau's rules of engagement on domestic investigations!"

His voice went alarmingly squeaky on that last.

"Then why don't you just _ask_ if we can have it?"

He just glared at her until she threw up her hands and let him do whatever he wanted.

The woman in the next booth had apparently had enough of their manners — she'd complained about little else the whole time they'd been sitting there — and got up to leave. As she passed their table, she muttered something about hooligans, then shrieked like someone was chasing her down with a meat cleaver.

Penny reached for the holster hidden in the small of her back and scanned the room, steeling herself for an imminent attack. But nothing looked out of the ordinary, except for the woman now running for the exit, the restaurant manager hurrying after her, and the photos Cooper had fanned out all over his side of the table.

The _autopsy_ photos.

"Jesus, Sheldon!" She let go of the butt of her gun and practically leaped across the table. "This is _so_ not the time."

He batted her hands away from the pictures. "My meemaw's the only one allowed to call me Sheldon."

Penny gaped at him. "What?" _What?_ What did that have to do with anything?

"My meemaw's the only one allowed to call me Sheldon. You can keep calling me Cooper, or any colorful epithet of your choice."

He pushed on the hand she had planted on top of a particularly gruesome shot of the inside of Dave Underhill's chest cavity. She dropped back onto the bench on her side of the booth.

"I'd prefer it if you didn't call me Moonpie again, though," he went on. "It's a family nickname that has unfortunately taken on new and less flattering meaning in the last few years, given my..."

He looked up and met her eyes for the first time since— Actually, Penny couldn't remember the last time he'd looked her in the face. It seemed like most of the past two days she'd been talking to the back of his head or the side of his face or, once, unforgettably: his pointy elbow a split second before it banged her in the forehead as he pried his suitcase out of the trunk of her car.

"My reputation," he finished, spitting the word like he couldn't stand the taste of it on his tongue.

Penny kept her attention on her food, embarrassed anew at having called him that to his face. She wanted to apologize but her brain went blank. She couldn't think of a single thing to say that she could be sure wouldn't come out just as insulting so she resolved to keep her mouth shut.

Unfortunately, her mouth had never had any trouble running off before her brain could catch up.

"Are you close to your meemaw?" _What?_

"I haven't seen her in twenty years," Cooper said.

Penny darted a glance up, hoping she hadn't upset him all over again. What was with her? Since when did she even care?

"She and my older brother were abducted when I was eight."

And apparently the rest of her body was now working in concert with her mouth and totally without her permission. She watched as if from a distance as one of her hands reached across the table and covered Cooper's. He didn't pull away and Penny braved another look at his face. He was staring out the window next to them, his jaw working like he was fighting to keep something in.

"What happened?" She tried to use the no-nonsense investigator's tone she'd been practicing late at night, but it came out little more than a whisper.

He pulled his hands out from under hers, folded them on the table. "I told you, they were abducted."

What could she say to that?

\---

The bar where the gossip column said Alicia had been working was just a block away from the restaurant, so Penny pocketed the keys and started walking. Cooper had no choice but to follow.

Inside, Penny hung back while he bellied up to the bar and passed a picture to the bartender, who took one quick glance and shrugged.

"Oh, I'd remember _her_ ," he said, giving Cooper a conspiratorial look. "She single?"

"She's dead."

The man blanched, the color draining out of his face so fast Penny thought he might pass out. "Oh, shit," he stammered. "I'm sorry, I didn't know. I just started here about two weeks ago."

He wiped his forehead with a bar towel and leaned heavily against the counter behind him. Penny moved in closer when she saw his eyes dart around the room and was glad she did when he turned to Cooper and whispered, "Did _they_ get her?"

Cooper dropped his voice. "Tell me what you know about _them_."

The bartender's eyes shot up toward the ceiling. The bar towel fluttered out of his hand as he crossed himself.

Penny turned away and caught a glimpse of someone ducking back into the kitchen. She stopped and waited, and sure enough, someone stuck their head out again. It was almost funny watching the girl's eyes get bigger when she realized she'd been seen.

She reached back and swiped the photo Cooper had left on the bar.

"Excuse me," she called, holding the picture out toward the girl. "Did you know her?"

The girl adjusted the headband holding her bright red hair off her face. "Yeah, I guess."

"So she worked here?"

"For like five minutes. She didn't look much like that picture either: darker hair, not as skinny. She just up and didn't show one day. I figured she found something better."

Penny nodded and tried to look friendly. "I'm sorry, I didn't introduce myself. I'm Penny, and the guy at the bar is Cooper. We're trying to figure out what happened to her. What's your name?"

"Ramona," the girl said. She tilted her head to get a better look behind Penny. "Cooper, you say?"

"That's what we call him. Were you friends with Alicia?"

Ramona gave her a withering look and went back to checking out Cooper. "I knew her well enough to know she was no good, how about that?"

"What about David Underhill? Did he ever come in?"

"Dave?" Ramona laughed. "He practically lived here. He taught at the college, you know, _so smart_. He was totally wasted on this town."

Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, Penny reminded herself that married didn't always mean what she thought it should. "Sounds like you knew him pretty well."

"Oh, _everybody_ knew Dave."

"Did Alicia?"

The question was enough to finally drag Ramona's attention away from the way Cooper sat stiffly on a stool, tapping his fingers against the rail. The look on her face was pure venom.

"What do you think her 'something better' was?"

She stalked away, making a beeline for the bar. Something alerted Cooper to her approach and he looked briefly over his shoulder. Ramona tossed her hair when their eyes met, then wedged herself into the space between him and the next stool. She leaned in when he leaned back slightly, until her breast brushed against his upper arm. And then she started twirling a lock of hair around one finger.

Cooper didn't seem to notice, just tilted a little farther away from the woman. He didn't break off his conversation with the still-sweating bartender either. Penny caught the look Ramona shot at the poor guy, who stammered something unintelligible and all but ran for a customer at the other end of the bar.

Penny choked back a laugh at the bewildered look on Cooper's face. He twisted on his seat, away from Ramona, and stood.

"Did you see that?" he asked, indignant. "What a rude man."

"Must have been something you said." Apparently it was Penny's turn to get the stink-eye as Ramona's oblivious prey slipped away. She pretended not to notice and pulled the car keys out of her pocket. "You ready to head back? It's after check-in time, finally."

"Why are your keys out? We walked here." He peered at her eyes and sniffed the air as she got closer. "Are you drunk again?"

"I'm not drunk, Cooper. Let's just go."

But he was like a terrier with a rat in its teeth once the idea got in his head.

"I realize that this is your first assignment, and you're hardly what I would call field-ready in any sense of the term, but this is unacceptable behavior, Penny. You can't just stumble around in an alcoholic haze from one location to the next as if...."

She tuned him out as they walked up the street toward the restaurant where they'd left the car. She was still puzzling over what Ramona had told her. If Alicia and Underhill were involved, there was no sign of it in any of the official documents they'd seen. Hardly surprising, given that it had taken all of five minutes to close their cases. But why these two people? Why had the extra-tees picked them? And why were they taken at different times?

They crossed the parking lot of the convenience store a few lots down from the bar. Cooper was still going strong, adding a wave of his arms every now and then.

"Granted, there doesn't seem to be a great deal to do in the vicinity but drink and eat substandard—"

She stopped and smacked her forehead. "Oh, that's it! Cooper, where did the Underhills live? It's not around here, is it?"

He looked peeved at having to interrupt his monologue on the ills of unprofessional conduct. "No, they had a house on Rubicon, by the university. Why?"

"Because he drank _here_ ," she headed back to the bar. "And I bet that's not all he did!"

"Why on earth would he be on this side of town when there's a perfectly good—"

But Penny was already too far away to find out what was perfectly good elsewhere.

Ramona was still standing where they'd left her, wedged between two stools. She was chewing out the bartender, who looked like he wanted to sink into the floor. When he saw Penny barrel through the door, he made a noise like a startled cat and ducked out of sight below the bar.

"Underhill," Penny said, "he met his girlfriends here, right? Or picked up whoever was available that night, whatever. Where did he take them?"

Ramona stiffened like the proverbial poker. "I really wouldn't know," she said. But her eyes flicked to the side, and it was all Penny could do to keep from reaching out to shake her.

"Where did he take you, Ramona?"

She flushed an angry red, the blotchy color spreading down over her neck and chest. "The motel on Tillamook. The Pasadena Inn."

The same motel they were staying in. Well, that could be interesting. Penny breathed a thank you and turned to go.

"Wait," Ramona called after her. "Your partner, is he... You know, available?"

"Trust me, you do not want to go there."

\---

The Pasadena Inn was a hole.

Penny dropped her bag on the dingy carpet. Directly over her bed was a sloppy patch of plaster already cracked and crumbling around a water spot in the middle. The edges were still fresh and white, but probably not for long. Her opinion of David Underhill, low enough as it was, plummeted even lower.

"Okay, I take it back," she shouted toward the connecting door. "A hole would be an improvement!"

There was a shuffling noise from the other room and then Cooper popped through the open doorway. He had crime scene booties on over his shoes and a pair of blue plastic gloves on his hands.

"Did you say something? I'm about to disinfect the shower in my room."

Penny just stared.

Cooper eyed her lone bag, a small hard-sided suitcase with wheels and a handle. Black and boring, it had been grabbed by at least a dozen hands on its way around the luggage carousel before getting dropped again once the name on the tag was visible. It seemed like the kind of bag a no-nonsense FBI agent would haul around on cases, and Penny hated the sight of it. She should have gotten the cute pink one with red piping like she wanted.

"Didn't you bring cleaning supplies with you?" he asked. "Tell me you at least have your own towels and toilet paper."

Instead of answering, she kicked off her shoes. Cooper gasped in horror as her feet — fully socked! She wasn't crazy — touched the carpet.

"Do you _want_ athlete's foot?" He started bustling around her room, stripping the comforters from the twin beds and holding them at arm's length. He threw them both in the open closet opposite the bathroom door. Before she could stop him he ducked into her bathroom and made a horrified noise. "This toilet is _gray_!"

"Cooper, forget the damn toilet!" She stomped in after him and dragged him back out. "Worry about your own bathroom and leave mine alone."

He shuddered and held his hands out away from his body, probably to keep from transferring the germs on his gloves to his clothes. His eyes were starting to look even crazier than normal, darting around the room and growing wider by the second. Penny cast about for something that might get his attention off how disgusting the place was.

"So, here's something I've been wondering," she said, aiming for casual and landing somewhere around strangled and high-pitched. "Why exactly do you think these aren't extra-tee abductions?"

Cooper stilled, his eyes going focused and alert in less time than it took for her to blink. He looked around the room again, but with none of his previous incipient panic. "I suppose it's safe to talk here."

In her head, Penny was making a total "okay, crazypants" face. She hoped it was just in her head.

"You pointed it out at Leonard's," he said. "Well, part of it, though you clearly didn't realize the importance. Remember? Nothing out of the ordinary in or around Pasadena during either of the two abductions and dumps. And at the site today, I saw no evidence of scorch marks, no indentations in the earth, no dead plant life or snapped branches. Neither of the corpses had any pre- or post-mortem bruising, just those missing pieces of flesh."

"Well, that doesn't mean anything," Penny protested. "Maybe they're using something new that you haven't seen before. I mean, only the Terror knows what—"

He made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. "The Terror only knows what they make up, Penny. Don't be so naive. These weren't extra-tee dumps; these were murders."

Yep, she was definitely going crazy. There was no way she was actually having this conversation.

"Look, you realize how you sound, right? I don't care what tests your mom made you take, Cooper. You can't go around talking about _murders_."

"Tell me, when Gablehauser interviewed you the day you showed up in my office. Was he alone?"

The quick change of subject left her scrambling for a second to catch up. She shook her head. "No, there was—"

"Another man in the office? Almost my height? Dark brown hair with a beard, possibly smoking clove cigarettes?"

How did he know about Creepy Clove Smoker? She hadn't even told him she met with the Director before reporting to his office!

" _Wil Wheaton_ ," he snarled. His entire body was transformed in an instant, from cringing germaphobe to six-feet-plus of fury, hands balled into fists at his sides. "That man has been trying to shut down my work for years, because he's afraid of the truth. Because he's afraid of what people will do when they see things as they actually are!"

She jumped out of his way as he stomped to the connecting door and slammed it behind him.

\---

There was nothing worth watching on the four channels the TV got, and even less worth paying attention to in the rest of the room. Penny washed up, careful not to actually touch anything in the bathroom with anything less than fully-clothed body parts. Changing into the sloppy sweats she brought to sleep in nearly sent her tumbling as she tried to keep any of her clothes from brushing against the carpet.

Once she was in bed, there was nothing to do but stare at the headlights moving on the other side of the curtains and think.

Penny didn't dwell much on her past, but she would never forget the sharp, bitter tang of fear the night she and her brother were arrested while making deliveries. It had all seemed like a game. Riding shotgun in his rattletrap of a truck, bouncing up and down the back roads as he dropped off cases of contraband liquor and collected money and favors. They grew up out in the middle of nowhere, smack in the center of a dry county west of Omaha. The fear-mongering teetotalers who had pushed the prohibition through between the wars had all died a generation earlier, but no one was in any particular hurry to change the law. Even if it was too much of a hassle to drive twenty miles one way to get a bottle of whiskey.

In the end, it only made sense that someone would step in to fill that gap in the supply chain. How exactly her brother was in a spot to step in wasn't something Penny would ever understand.

The night they got caught was beautiful. Late as it was, there was still a hot, humid wind blowing over the prairie. No clouds to block the stars or the tiny sliver of the moon. As they bumped down the dirt road between the Johnson ranch and the south end of the airfield, Waylon and Willie serenaded each other on the radio and Penny trailed her fingers through the wind.

Over the next hill, there were three squad cars from the sheriff's office — each with a revenuer along for the catch.

Penny cried for almost four hours straight. All the way back to town and on the long drive into Omaha. Through processing and fingerprinting and mug shots and getting locked in an eight-by-eight cell with a woman passed out on the floor. Contrary to everything she'd ever seen in the movies and on TV, she didn't have the right to a phone call. She didn't have any rights at all, except to see her lawyer if she could afford one.

Sometime in the night, her parents arrived to bail her out. There was nothing they could do for her brother — with a list of charges longer than her leg, he wouldn't be going anywhere for years unless by some miracle he was acquitted.

After making sure she hadn't been mistreated, her dad didn't speak to her again for six months.

Two weeks before her junior year started, the judge dropped the gavel and ordered her to sign up for Junior ROTC. The cheerleading squad dropped her faster than Christy dropped her pants. Penny spent most of the winter playing The Sims and writing long, maudlin, self-pitying letters to her sister. If it hadn't been for the miles she was expected to run every weekend, she would have weighed about a million pounds by the time the corn sprouted.

The summer before her senior year, her JROTC unit got permission to do PT in the stadium three mornings a week. When the football team started two-a-days, it got harder and harder to care about improving her time on the mile when a dozen hot guys were dripping sweat inside the oval track. The humidity didn't get any heavier, but Penny's shirts and shorts got tighter and shorter and the guys' stares got longer and longer.

By the time classes started, she'd already slept with Kurt twice. It took another six weeks before he'd call her his girlfriend in public, but she was so far gone he could have called her his maiden aunt and she would have celebrated hearing her name out loud.

Her grades didn't slip; the judge's voice was still too fresh in her mind for her to backslide far. But Kurt didn't care about school except for maintaining a good enough average to not lose his football scholarship, so Penny stopped caring too. She did the minimum, got in and out without making any waves. When she marched across the field to get her diploma, her only worries were whether her dress showed through the gown and if Kurt would pick her up in time for the parties.

After graduation, with a choice between waiting tables with her sister in Omaha or following Kurt to the University of Virginia and waiting tables there, she'd decided the free ride was the better option. Unfortunately, that's just about all she'd been to him as well: a warm body in his bed when he wanted it and a housekeeper when he didn't. Penny used the graduation money from her grandpa and enrolled in classes just for something to do, to keep the gnawing, homesick feeling at bay.

But within weeks someone from the ROTC program had found her. She couldn't face going back in and maybe getting called up for relief duty somewhere, so she dropped out. For the next four years, she picked up shifts at chain restaurants and sat at home waiting for Kurt to come home: from road games, from parties, from physio after he blew out his knees in the Peach Bowl game his senior year and lost all hope for the draft.

It wasn't until she walked in on Kurt going to town on the next-door neighbor that she realized how much time she'd wasted. By the time the dust settled and she was moved in to her own apartment, she'd narrowed her options to two possibilities: going back to school or going home.

Penny enrolled at a local community college a week later. She sailed through the first semester with a raft of easy _A_ s and somehow wound up with an FBI recruiter on her doorstep one Saturday morning. It sounded like a dream come true: a paycheck that didn't depend on smiling at rude assholes, actual chances at advancement that didn't involved fryolators or bank loans, and maybe even a chance to start over somewhere else with a job that was pretty much guaranteed for life.

The Bureau's lame reputation didn't bother her much. Once you lived through high school, she figured, there wasn't much left to scar you.

So, now, here she was: a crappy motel in Pasadena, feeling like she was facing the start of the same bad road she'd driven down with her brother. But who was trying to lead her down it? Was it Cooper, with his irrational hatred of a man whose name she'd never heard before that night, paranoid pronouncements and crazy conspiracies?

Or was it Gablehauser? She hated him for his smug assumption that she would leap at the chance to rat out her partner, temporary though the assignment was. She hated him even more that she was still dithering over whether or not she would take him up on it.

With a groan, she threw off the musty blanket and jammed her feet into her shoes. The lock on the connecting door fought her at first, and she had to throw her weight into it just to get the deadbolt to turn.

The door on Cooper's side was wide open. She knocked on the jamb anyway, and stuck her head into his room.

"You decent?"

He almost smiled. "Maybe next time you'll ask before you're in any danger of seeing for yourself."

When she stepped over the threshold, he turned back to the suitcase he was unpacking into collapsible plastic trays, leaving her standing awkwardly by the door. The polyester curtains over his window smelled like air freshener, with a distinct hint of old smoke and mildew underneath. She went to sit in the armchair turned to face the bed and propped her feet on the mattress. Just as he'd done in her room, the comforters had been stripped, leaving thin grayed sheets and threadbare blankets.

"So, I was thinking," she started.

"A dangerous activity."

"Shut up," she said, fighting a stupid grin that came out of nowhere. "I was _thinking_ , you haven't explained yet why you think these aren't abductions. Let alone why you think you stumbled onto the first murders since... since like, what was it? Kennedy was President or something."

She expected Cooper to get all het up at her imprecision but he shocked her by continuing to unfold and refold his socks using a big flipboard.

"These aren't the first murders in fifty years," he said at last.

"Cooper..."

"They're not the first murders," he repeated. "Meemaw— I didn't tell you the whole story."

Her heart dropped into her stomach like a stone. She swallowed, hard. "Did they...."

"They found Meemaw two days later, dumped in the middle of some rancher's pasture like a side of beef." His voice, normally so even and clipped, had roughened, the soft consonants of his Texas drawl sneaking back in. "We never saw my brother again."

Penny felt tears threaten, thick on the back of her throat. She had to swallow three times before any words would come out.

"And they said it was— It was aliens?" It had been so long since she had said the word, since she'd heard anyone say the word. It sliced a bolt of panic right down her spine, just feeling her lips form around it.

"Of course they did. There hasn't been a murder by a human since 1962, you know. Something came down out of the sky and took them away. That's what it said in the papers, and on Meemaw's death certificate."

In the mirror over the dresser she saw Cooper's face twist in a bitter smile, his lips tight against his teeth.

"But I saw the man who did it. I _saw_ him, Penny."

His hands balled into fists, wrinkling the neatly folded shirts and slacks in his suitcase.

"My sister was at a slumber party and Mom and Dad had gone out, so Meemaw was staying with us. I couldn't sleep, and I got up in the middle of the night for a glass of water. George Junior's door was open and someone was leaning over his bed. It was a man. Not an alien, a man. With pale skin and hair, and alligator-skin boots."

His voice had gone flat, the words sounding like he'd repeated them a thousand times. Until the edges wore off and he lost any hope of anyone believing him.

"I'd always wanted alligator-skin boots." He cleared his throat. "In any event, I hid. The next thing I knew, my mother was screaming and there was blood all over the wall outside my brother's room. And then the police came and stood around drinking coffee while my sister cried. Mom and Dad didn't stop yelling at each other for two days. Until they found—"

Penny was up and across the room before she realized she was moving. Her hand hovered just inches away from his back. His head was bowed forward, his fists propped on the wall to either side of the mirror. He swallowed, his adam's apple jumping.

She let her hand come to rest between his shoulder blades. His muscles jumped under her touch but he didn't shy away. He took a deep shuddering breath, then another, and then she spoke, just to break the silence.

"Did you tell them what you saw?"

Cooper huffed through his nose. "I told them what I saw. They told me it was a nightmare, that I made it all up because the reality was too much to deal with."

"Oh, God," Penny whispered. "I'm so sorry."

She didn't know how long they stood there, Cooper staring at his clothes while she rubbed circles on his back like he was a colicky baby. It could have been hours, for all she knew.

Finally, he straightened, shrugging off her touch. He zipped up his suitcase and carried his towels into the bathroom. He closed the door behind him, the latch catching with a quiet _snick_ that was deafening in the silence. By the dresser, Penny pulled on the hem of her tank top and looked around, trying to decide whether to beat a hasty retreat to spare him the embarrassment or to stand her ground. In the end, Cooper took the decision out of her hands.

"I think there have been countless murders since then," he called from behind the bathroom door. He turned the tap on and off, then stepped back into the room, wiping his hands on a small blue towel. "But for whatever reason, they think it's better to let people think there haven't been any."

"But if that's true, why cover it up? Why don't people know about them? You keep talking about _them_ ; who's _them_?"

It just didn't make any sense! Forget _why_ , forget _who_ , how was it even possible? For a cover-up of this size, you'd need massive resources. Global access, a network of trusted people to carry out your orders. You'd need an army....

Her knees threatened to buckle when her brain finally caught up to itself.

"The Terror?" she asked, hoping he would laugh and tell her not to be ridiculous. "You're talking about the Terror, aren't you?"

The look on his face was the only answer she needed.

\---

Penny was fuming. She was shocked that steam wasn't pouring out of her ears as she waved off the cab rumbling at the curb and got in the rental car. She pulled out of the police station's parking lot before Cooper had finished buckling in and headed back to the motel.

After fleeing from Cooper's room — hoping he was every bit as crazy as he seemed to be, that nothing he'd said was true — she'd sat at the wobbly table by the window and gone through the files once again. She didn't know why; there was nothing there that she could see, nothing of any importance at all. But she wanted to prove him wrong somehow, to find one piece of evidence she could point to and say, "There! Look there. It can't be what you say it is. It can't be."

Unfortunately, what she knew about extra-tee abductions would fit on the head of a pin, with plenty of room to spare, and she knew even less about murders. It was the kind of thing that only turned up in terrible shows they ran late at night on the science fiction channel. Or old black and white movies with fedoras and stilted dialogue.

She kept imagining eight-year-old Cooper, curled up on the floor of a closet, waiting in the dark for a nightmare.

Finally, Penny gave up. After a quick hover over the toilet so she didn't touch the seat with any part of her body, she crawled into the bed farthest from the door. There had been no noise from the next room for hours, not even the rumble of a TV.

Sleep came quickly. It had been a long day, made even longer by the time change, the ridiculously early start Cooper had forced on her, and the unceasing frustration of trying to keep up with him.

She was so tired, she didn't even hear the phone call when it came. It was the pounding on the wall behind her head that woke her, along with someone bellowing, "Answer the goddamn phone or I will answer it for you!"

It didn't make any more sense once she woke up enough to process it. The voice on the other end of the line made even less. It was the duty sergeant at the police station, barely containing his laughter when he told her she needed to come get her partner. Who'd gotten himself arrested for peeping and unlawful entry.

She'd been ditched. Good and ditched, and left to scramble for the number of Pasadena's one and only cab at four o'clock in the morning while Cooper cooled his heels in the drunk tank.

"You said you only drive when it's absolutely necessary!" she growled.

"This drive _was_ absolutely necessary," Cooper said. He was completely unruffled, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary to get bailed out of jail in the middle of the night by your partner. Who was still in her pajamas!

"How did you even get the keys?"

"Really," he chided, "if you want to be a successful agent you need a better awareness of your surroundings."

"What were you thinking?" she shrieked, wincing at the shrill sound of her own voice. She took a deep breath, then another, before continuing in a much less frenzied tone. "Why did you ditch me, for crying out loud? If I'm going to work with you—"

" _For_ me," he corrected. "Ramona called and asked me to meet her. Alone."

"Of course she did," Penny muttered.

"She said she wasn't entirely truthful with you. By the way, if you're to continue working for me, I expect that when you interview witnesses you _tell me what they say_. I won't tolerate you keeping me in the dark," he lectured.

 _Of all the sanctimonious, hypocritical horseshit...._ Penny almost choked on the retort she wanted to unleash.

Cooper didn't notice. "She said that Underhill didn't just pick up women at the bar. He had a girlfriend who worked at the university with him." He paused and moved his hand in front of his face like he was turning pages in a book. "Leslie Winkle, 29, married to a Barry Kripke. But the last Ramona heard, Underhill was planning to leave his wife."

Penny shook her head, trying to keep up. "For this Leslie Winkle?"

"That would be the logical assumption. However, logic rarely seems to have anything to do with copulation."

"C- _copulation_?"

"Are you unfamiliar with the term?"

"I'm fam—"

"It means coitus. Sexual intercourse. If the goal were to produce offspring or a long-term emotional bond, I suppose you could call it mating."

He sounded way too interested in that line of conversation, and the prospect of hearing him talk it out was giving Penny the weirdest mix of repulsion and fascination.

Something else Penny was definitely not mentioning — to anyone, ever — was the way her abdomen clenched with arousal at the way his lips moved when he said intercourse.

She interrupted before he could really get going.

"So Underhill was leaving his wife for Leslie Winkle?"

"Oh, no!" he said, as if it should have been obvious. "For Alicia Azlynn."

"So why did you break into that poor woman's house?"

"Oh, she's not poor. Her property is worth at least half a million dollars, even in this weak economy. It's a matter of—"

"Right now, I don't really care. I want to go back to sleep so we can get the fuck out of here tomorrow without me driving off a bridge on the way."

"Why would we leave?" He looked genuinely confused, like he couldn't begin to follow the logic that led her to that conclusion. She wanted to throttle him.

"Why would we stay?! Cooper, you broke into _her house_. That crosses so many lines, I can't even begin to count them!"

He started to protest, but she changed the subject. She was determined to win the argument, to get them the hell out of Dodge as soon as humanly possible. Faster than that, even, if she could swing it. But why was he determined to stay? Surely Ramona's word alone wasn't enough to keep his investigation alive.

"What did you see at Leslie's house?"

He crossed his arms and slumped in his seat, his face hidden in shadow as she drove through the deserted streets. "What do you think I saw there?"

"The Easter Bunny," she deadpanned. She'd had just about enough of his prodding her into guessing what he was talking about. If she'd known a temporary field assignment would be every bit as annoying as pairing up with an instructor who answered every question with another, maybe she would have thought harder about walking out on Gablehauser's offer. "I don't really feel like playing this game at ass o'clock in the morning, Cooper."

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him check his watch as if he expected to see 'ass' there, right between the four and five.

She pulled into the motel lot and parked outside her room. She cut the lights but left the engine running. It was cold this early in the morning and she wanted to keep the heat trickling out of the vents as long as possible.

"Do you remember the clerk who refused to check us in this afternoon?"

Tallish guy, dark hair, nice build. Sure, she remembered him. "You almost made his head explode."

"Yes, he—" A strip of light from the security light above fell across Cooper's face. He squinted. "Yes. That's Barry Kripke."

"Get _out_ ," Penny gasped.

When Cooper reached for the door handle, she waved a hand to stop him. "No, I mean... Never mind. He's Winkle's husband?"

He nodded.

"She's married to a guy who works at the motel where her boyfriend brought his girlfriends?"

"Apparently."

Interesting. Insane, but interesting nonetheless. It still wasn't enough to make up for dragging her out of a nice, warm, not too clean-smelling bed in the middle of the night, but awkward romantic entanglements were much more her speed than government conspiracies. She still didn't see what had Cooper so convinced that it wasn't the work of extra-tees in Pasadena, but she felt a little stab of sympathy for Kripke. Had he seen his wife meeting her lover, right there at the motel where he worked?

"So, what now?" she asked Cooper.

He looked at her like she was a particularly dull-witted child. "We sleep. Tomorrow morning, or later this morning, I should say, we're going back to her house and we're going to get inside that shed."

She exploded. "Are you _crazy_?"

Cooper smiled, just a slight tilt to his mouth, then pulled something out of his jacket pocket. She grabbed it out of the air when he tossed it and snapped on the overhead light.

It was a plastic evidence baggie. Inside was a sheathed knife, the kind hunters used to skin their catch. It was scrupulously clean, not a trace of blood or fur anywhere on the handle, blade, or leather sheath as far as she could tell.

"I don't—"

"Look at the stitching," Cooper said. "In the grommets."

Penny held the bag closer to her face. When she squinted, it almost came into focus. There was something limp and fragile clinging to the grommet on the underside of the sheath where the looped belt hanger attached. She unzipped the top of the bag and reached inside.

When she pulled her hand back, there was a yellow flower petal on the tip of her finger like those she'd seen in the photos of Alicia Azlynn's body.

\---

Late the next morning, they sat in the rental car, trying to look inconspicuous on a street with very few parked cars.

Kripke was already on duty behind the desk when they left the motel. And according to the student assistant Penny talked to at the university, Leslie had a solid block of classes from eleven to three, then drop-in office hours until five. If she ever actually left for work, they would have plenty of time to get in and out. Hopefully with whatever it was Cooper thought they would find.

"I wish we had a warrant," Penny said. There wasn't a judge in the country who would have granted one, which was why they didn't have one. Still, it would have been nice. Her career might be headed straight down the toilet but that didn't mean she wanted to land in prison.

Cooper adjusted something on the binoculars he had trained on the house. "I wish we had Luminol."

"Lumi-what?"

"Luminol. To check for traces of blood."

She laughed. "That sounds like something on a bad TV show."

"What do they _teach_ you at the academy? Chemiluminescent compounds have been used for criminal forensic investigations since the 1930s. Granted, usage has fallen off since the revelations but that's because...."

He went on for a good five minutes without pausing for breath, it seemed. Penny just let him go; Cooper in lecture mode was an oddly compelling sight. He used his hands to emphasize bizarre portions of his sentences: a quick slashing motion for something about a laboratory, a fluttering of both hands when he talked about iron content. She wondered if in some other life, one where he didn't wind up in the FBI, would he have been a teacher?

"You didn't listen a word I said, did you?" he accused. "Penny, how are you going to learn anything if you don't pay attention? You're not a complete imbecile but you can't expect knowledge to just fall into your head, no matter...."

No, on second thought, there was probably no version of Sheldon Cooper that was capable of teaching. Not without getting fired on his first day. Or _set_ on fire.

"Gablehauser wants me to spy on you," she interrupted. She braced for an explosion on the scale of what he'd done the night before.

"I know. It's okay."

"What? No, it's not 'okay'. He wants me to report on everything you do! He's probably already shitting himself because I haven't checked in yet."

"Tell him whatever you have to."

He shrugged and lifted the binoculars again.

Penny followed his gaze; there was still no movement and Leslie's car was parked beside the house.

"He's trying to shut you down, Cooper."

"If he could, he would have already."

"I'm not going to," she promised, making up her mind on the spot. If it meant her career crashed and burned before it even got started, so be it. At least she wouldn't feel dirty. Gablehauser would just have to find somebody else to threaten.

Cooper gave her a considering look then went back to his visual sweep of the street. "Why not?"

"It's not right, for one thing. And for another..." She toyed with the keys still hanging from the ignition. "I don't know. It's just not right."

"So, you're doing me a favor?"

She scowled. "No. Well, I guess."

"And what do you want in return?"

"That's not what I— Why would you ask that? I'm not doing this _for_ anything."

"Right and wrong don't have much to do with my line of work, Penny. And no one ever gets something for nothing. It's mathematically impossible." He dropped the binoculars and picked up their zippered case. "She's leaving."

They both slumped down in their seats even though Leslie drove in the opposite direction. They waited another five minutes after she drove out of sight before getting out of the car. Penny tried to look casual as they crossed the street and walked up the block.

"What if we don't find anything? We don't have anything else to go on."

"Then we go back to DC, and they get away with it."

 _Right_ , Penny thought. _No pressure then._

Cooper led the way up the driveway and around the back of the house, into an overgrown garden. Weeds grew up higher than her knees in the raised flower beds. Some straggled out across a lawn that hadn't been mowed in weeks. The brick walks were crumbling and all but obscured by grass growing between the pavers. The shed he'd mentioned was actually a four-car garage that looked like it had started in life as a carriage house, with barred, shuttered windows and a security keypad next to both bay doors.

Penny pulled the lockpick set out of her pocket and headed for the normal-sized door on the side of the building. Cooper said that from what he'd seen the night before, there was no need to disable the security system; the keypads were just for show.

It didn't take long to get the door open. Apparently having someone arrested out of their backyard did little to impress the Winkles. Or the Kripkes? The Kripke-Winkles?

She pushed open the door, wincing at the creak that seemed as loud as a jet engine. Cooper followed her in and snapped on the flashlight he'd pulled from somewhere. How many pockets were in that windbreaker, anyway?

It was hot and dusty and just about empty. There was a clear path that cut across the otherwise dirty floor, like someone had taken a broom or a mop to it recently. From the outside, Penny judged the building to be about thirty feet long, but inside there was a wall that stretched across the space about half that far back. The path led straight to the door in the middle of it.

"I found the knife over there," Cooper said, pointing to a workbench that ran along the length of the wall to her right. "See if I missed anything. I'm going to look over here."

He flashed the light over a pile of trash in the corner.

They worked quickly, or Cooper did anyway. He was back at her side in a matter of minutes, while Penny was still searching through the first cabinet under the bench.

"So what do we do if we find something?" she asked his thigh, the only part of him she could see from her awkward crouch. "What's the plan for convincing anyone they've somehow landed their first murders in like fifty years? Something tells me Chief Sweatpants—"

His thigh moved a few feet further down the bench. "Captain. He was very clear on that."

"Something tells me _Captain_ Sweatpants isn't going to want the headache."

"Huh, I think you might be right," a woman drawled from behind them. "That's a really great observation, Barbie. I'm impressed."

" _Vewy_ impwessed," a man's voice clarified.

Penny tried to jump to her feet before she'd pulled her head out of the cabinet. She cracked her head on the wood and reeled backward. Next to her, Cooper patted his hands over his chest but his magic pockets appeared to have outlived their usefulness. He held his hands up in front of him at about waist-height and stepped ahead of Penny, angling his body in front of her like he'd just appointed himself her bodyguard.

"Oh, don't tell me you didn't bring a weapon, Agent Cooper!" Leslie Winkle was standing just inside the side door, Barry Kripke right behind her. Leslie didn't have anything that looked dangerous, unless you counted her intensely ugly corduroy jacket — if she weren't a killer, Penny might have considered her a good match for Cooper. Unfashionably speaking, anyway.

On the other hand, Barry was carrying a cattle prod.

The shaft looked to be about thirty-six inches of steel, with a plastic cap on the prong end and a customized leather handle. It wasn't the kind of prod her dad and uncles used to load livestock bound for slaughter, with a voltage just high enough to give the steers an itch.

This was big. And ugly. This was the kind of prod her great-grandpa might have carried, in an era before anyone much cared about animal cruelty.

Leslie and Barry stepped all the way inside the garage. Barry pulled the door closed behind him and threw the deadbolt. He tossed Penny an exaggeratedly flirtatious wink when he caught her stare.

She ignored him. Forty seconds wasn't long but it was more than enough time to sum up the situation. Barry might be holding the weapon, but Winkle was the dominant of the two.

Penny refused to put her hands up the way Cooper was doing but she was careful not to make any sudden movements. The weight of the holster on her back was comforting. All she had to do was distract them long enough to go for it — everybody knew the Bureau didn't license its agents for firearms. But her little peashooter, a gift from Kurt in much happier times, would tip the situation back into her hands well enough.

"We're federal agents," she warned.

"Ooh, I'm so scared," Leslie deadpanned. She dropped the mocking expression a second later and waved them both into the center of the room, away from any potential weapons on or in the workbench.

Penny tried to gauge the distance to the door. She figured she had a shot of making it without getting inside Kripke's extended range.

Cooper narrowed his eyes when he caught her look. The briefest shake of his head and she let her hand drop to her side. He pulled his chin in and raised his eyebrows. Bugged out his eyes, nodded toward the floor.

None of which made a damn bit of sense to Penny.

He did it again, his eyes just about falling out on the floor. She mirrored his expression, more out of frustration than anything else.

Cooper shook his head and turned toward Leslie. "The local police know we're here. They're waiting for us to check in."

Penny tried to keep her face neutral, to not react with even the slightest hint of surprise at his lies. His voice was so smooth and even, she could hardly believe it.

"They'll be here any minute if they don't hear from us, Winkle. Much as I hate to resort to pedestrian cliche, you won't get away with this."

Leslie laughed. "On the contrary, I think I will, _dumbass_. Or did you actually think you were smarter than me?" She looked between them and put a hand to her cheek in mock surprise. "Oh, you did, didn't you? Too bad about that."

Behind her, Kripke shook his head and pulled an exaggerated pout.

"It's also too bad," Leslie continued, "that you didn't check for surveillance cameras when you came blundering in." She pointed over her head.

Penny swore. Right smack in the middle of the ceiling was a huge tan camera housing like one she'd seen at Leonard's back in Virginia. It was aimed at the side door and had given them away before they'd even set foot in the shed.

"And who taught you surveillance? A blind man?"

Barry snickered and started swinging the cattle prod next to his leg. His face was adoring, sickening, as he looked at his wife, who gave Cooper a long, leisurely look from the tips of his toes to the top of his head and back again.

Her tongue came out to wet her bottom lip and she straightened her glasses. "So, tell me, Cooper. How'd we do it? Since you've so clearly outwitted us."

Barry laughed again. The tip of the prod was moving in aimless figure eights.

"You incapacitate them—"

Cooper sounded like he was settling in for one of his monologues. As much as Penny wanted to hear this particular one, she wanted to get them the hell out of there even more. His point-by-point recitation of their crimes could wait.

Penny threw herself across the few feet separating her from Leslie, who was so startled she didn't get her arms up until the very last second. They hit the ground hard, Leslie on the bottom, arms and legs flailing for purchase.

Her chest ached from the impact and the struggle to pull air back into her lungs. Leslie got in one solid shot, an elbow to the temple that scrambled Penny's brain on top of the hit she'd taken from the workbench. She could barely keep her eyes from crossing. Something crashed to the ground next to her and she rolled away, then pushed herself to her knees.

There was a hard hit to her forearm, the pain shooting up to explode in her head. She lost her grip on Leslie and fell to the side. Her eyes were watering so much she could only make out dark, amorphous blobs struggling against each other a few feet away. She managed to get one arm behind her, the one that didn't feel like a lead pancake, and her gun fell with a clatter and spun away across the concrete floor.

She scrabbled after it, and flipped on her back like a turtle when someone's foot caught her in the ribs.

The last thing she saw was the twin prongs of the electric prod headed for her chest. There was a loud noise — like her name in another language and from a million miles away — and a smell like burning cotton before the lightning bolts hit and her entire body tried to unknit itself.

\---

She woke up in the back of an ambulance with a blood pressure cuff squeezing her bicep and someone sticking a chunk of quartz practically up her nose.

"I'm fine," she ground out, swatting at the hands trying to keep her from undoing the cuff. The world swam around her when she sat up. Her whole body ached, with painful muscle tremors sparking up and down her legs and back. She kept her head still until it settled again and finished ripping the velcro open. "It's nothing. Where's my partner?"

The medic was a pretty boy with short blond hair that she would have stuck around to admire under other circumstances. But in these circumstances, she needed to find Cooper and make sure he was all right. She couldn't remember anything that happened after she rushed Leslie. There was a cold, hard knot of fear sinking lower in her belly with every second; panic splashed in its wake. She fumbled for the holster in the small of her back, cursing when her hands came up empty. Of course, the weapon must have been knocked out of her hands when— no! There it was, sitting unsecured on the end of her stretcher.

Penny lurched for it, her fingers just brushing the cold metal when it was scooped up off the white sheet. She tensed and launched herself at whoever it was who had just stolen her gun.

The dizzies returned with a vengeance when she lowered her head. She stumbled, her legs moving the wrong way and getting her feet tangled up on the restraining bolts secured to the floor. She toppled sideways. The medic grabbed her by the waist a second before she slammed her head into an overhead cabinet.

"Whoa!" Stuart cried, jumping back down to the pavement. "Hold your horses, there. Cooper asked me to secure this while you were transported."

"He's here? Where?" Her voice came out weak and shaky, betraying far too much that she would rather have kept inside. Forever, preferably. A roaring sound welled up inside her head, making it hard to concentrate on what Stuart was saying.

He turned and pointed off to one side of the road beside the ambulance. "He's talking to the chief. You're lucky we got here when we did. Another five minutes and that whole shed would have come down on top of you guys."

Something wasn't right; they hadn't been in any danger from a collapsing building! But the roaring was getting louder and her knees went wobbly with relief. She sagged against the medic's arm and let him lower her to the stretcher. When he tried to make her lie down, though, she shot him her dirtiest look.

"Fine, have it your way," he grumbled. He turned and starting putting away his crystals and unguents. When she tried to stagger to her feet again, he kept his back to her.

Stuart offered her his arm when she jumped down from the ambulance. She ignored it, and reached for her gun instead. He gave it up easily, with a smile even.

"It's a nice piece," he said, "and it was nice meeting you, Penny. You two should probably head on out now."

"What?" She would have shaken her head if she weren't worried it would roll right off. "But what about Winkle and Kripke? They killed that—"

She stopped talking at a sudden pressure on her arm, just above the elbow. Cooper had come up beside her out of nowhere. She gaped up at him, at the dirt on his cheek. His short hair was sticking straight up on one side, and the neck of his olive green shirt was stretched out enough to reveal the canary yellow one underneath.

"Detective Sussman, I would say it was a pleasure but we both know that's a lie."

Stuart's smile didn't slip in the slightest, but Penny thought his eyes narrowed just a fraction. "Well," he said, "I certainly wouldn't want you to lie."

Cooper nodded and set off down the street to where they'd left the car, however long ago that had been. He kept his grip tight around Penny's arm and towed her along behind him until she managed to wrench free.

"What the hell are you doing?" she cried. "Where are we going? How the hell did they even get here in time?"

"We tripped the alarm."

"You _what_? You said it didn't work!"

"No, I said it wouldn't need deactivation. Which it didn't, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to trip it. And we would be dead," he added, almost as an afterthought.

"What about Winkle? Kripke? We can't—"

"Just get in the car. We're done here."

"But—"

"They win, Penny. Let's go."

He climbed in the passenger seat, fastened his seatbelt, and didn't look at her once on the way back to the motel.

When Penny unlocked the door and stepped inside, she almost turned on her heel and walked back out again, sure she had accidentally gone into the wrong room. But on a second glance she recognized the flowered luggage tag on her otherwise non-descript bag. But it wasn't sitting on the low dresser where she'd left it. None of her clothes were strewn around the room either. She rushed over and unzipped her bag. Her clothes were neatly folded and packed inside.

She looked over at the table where she had spread out all of the files and notes Cooper had let her keep. They were all gone. In their place were two plane tickets, folded inside plain white envelopes with the airline's red and blue logo printed on the front.

The connecting door opened and Cooper stepped through, pulling his bag behind him.

"You knew they would do this, didn't you?" she accused. "That's why you didn't argue with Stuart!"

"This isn't my first rodeo, Penny."

\---

Once they were in the air — and she dug her fingernails out of the armrests after the roaring takeoff — Penny looked around the cabin. Satisfied that no one was paying them any attention, she leaned in toward Cooper and hissed, "How can you just let them sweep this under the rug?"

He didn't move, didn't open his eyes. Didn't acknowledge her in any way. He'd been oddly quiet since they left the motel. There had been no complaining about her driving all the way back to the airport, no bitching at the gate agent about moving the line more efficiently. He hadn't demanded a single thing of their flight attendant.

He didn't even ask for a pillow still wrapped in plastic, just took the dingy white one the attendant offered and stuck it behind his head.

Penny dug her nails into his upper arm. " _Cooper_. How can you let them get away with this?"

"Because it's what they do, Penny. It's what _I_ do."

"But everyone thinks you're nuts!"

Penny snatched her hand away when he finally opened his eyes and turned toward her. She expected him to look defeated, broken. Or furious. She wouldn't have been at all surprised to see his eyes almost incandescent with rage, as incongruous as that would have been given everything else she'd seen of him in the last few days.

Deep down, though, she thought that it probably wouldn't take much to push him over that edge, to grow dark and hateful. Even if he did look like a stiff breeze could knock him down most of the time.

But he wasn't any of these things. He looked almost _gleeful_ , and she suddenly understood why he had been ignoring her. Cooper was hard to read when he really concentrated on it, like he had done before his outburst the night before. Before he told her about his family.

But something had shifted since then, something huge. Whatever it was he kept so tightly locked away was starting to bubble up to the surface until she could practically smell it on him.

She sat back and shook her head. The more she did, the wider his smile grew until he looked downright demented.

"You did _not_ ," she said. "You couldn't have! I didn't see you— Oh, my God, it was in your pocket, wasn't it? That's why you kept jerking your head...."

Cooper reached into the chest pocket of his ugly windbreaker and pulled out her recorder. She grabbed it, sliding through the menus until she found the notes folder and hit the quick replay button.

"—think I will, _dumbass_. Or did you actually think you were smarter than—"

The rest of Leslie Winkle's confession was drowned out by the whoop Penny let out. Someone a few rows back shushed her and she called out a thoroughly unrepentant, "Sorry!"

She handed the recorder back to Cooper, who tucked it away again and let his head drop back.

"What are you going to do with it, though?" Penny asked. "The Terror were probably on the scene before we even left Pasadena. I bet they were the ones who stole my stuff!"

She gasped. "Oh, my God! Do you think _Stuart_ was—"

This time Cooper shushed her. "Not here," he cautioned.

Penny stiffened. "Right," she whispered. She couldn't see anyone looking at them but Cooper had been at this a lot longer. He must have noticed something. "Should I see if I can draw them out when we land?"

"No," Cooper said, "no one's listening. I just wanted you to be quiet so I could sleep."

The squawk he gave when she dug her thumb into his ribs was like music to her ears. Even if it did bring over the flight attendant, who threatened to separate them for the rest of the flight if they didn't settle down.

As she walked away, Cooper said in a low voice that barely carried to Penny's ears, "They'll put your name on the airline's nuisance list now."

She scoffed. "I've got a feeling it won't be the last list you get my name on."

He didn't say anything. Penny pulled the Sky Mall catalog out of the seat pouch and started flipping through it. It had been a rough couple of days. She deserved at least two new pairs of shoes as compensation, and that was just to start.

Cooper's breath evened out and his head started to loll sideways. She nudged his shoulder with hers so he tilted in the opposite direction. He snorted in irritation.

"I wonder if I can start my own nickname around the Bureau. You know, take the sting out of it."

"I don't think it works like that," he mumbled. "It seems to be a distinction people force on you, not the other way around."

"Aw, Moonpie, you just haven't been trying hard enough."

\----

"What do you mean, they're on their way back to DC?" Gablehauser shouted at the man lounging behind _his_ desk. "You told me it was all taken care of!"

The man tapped a pack of cigarettes against his palm and withdrew one. "I answer to a higher authority, Eric. You know that."

"I don't care who gives your orders, Wheaton," Gablehauser blustered. "This is bullshit. You promised me that—"

Wheaton's voice was like ice. "I promised you nothing. I told you that the Terror had taken an interest in this new agent. _You_ jumped to conclusions. So let me tell you this. Straight-up. No equivocations: Sheldon and Penny are off-limits. You so much as look at them cross-eyed, and we're going to be taking a special interest in you for a change."

He smirked and stood, flicking ashes onto the black leather chair and the immaculate desktop. "Oops," he said, an exaggerated look of concern on his face. "Did _I_ do _that_?"

As Gablehauser watched, all but trembling with anger and frustration, Wheaton ground out the butt of his cigarette on the polished oak. He clapped the director on the shoulder as he passed.

"You take care, now, Eric. We'll be keeping a _much_ closer eye on things now."


End file.
